Malfunctional
by Laryna6
Summary: Hurting is easy, healing is hard. Dr. Light has a unique family: Blues has issues, Rock is adorably clueless, Roll is put-upon, Forte's bombing the rosebushes, Dr. Cossack is a bleeding heart, Kalinka's nearing teenagerdom... and Dr. Wily is dying. RMC AU
1. A day in the life

Hmm… working in this series is interesting for me. Most of my work in the first series was AU, but generally of the 'change one thing or set up one alternate situation and see what follows from the principles of the rest of the canon' variety. In my second, the first project I wanted to do was a prequel project, and doing that, creating a prequel that fits with a story realistically despite almost no character data requires _fanatic _devotion to canon. You don't have ICness to make readers go, yes, this is a (insert fandom here) story, so you have to match the canon world/history/feel _very_ well to keep it from seeming like something original you just made up instead of a fanfic at all.

I don't object to people saying 'screw canon' which is a common misconception, sadly. I object for people saying 'this is IC/this is canon' when if they actually look at the series more closely it becomes very obvious that no, it is not. It is both stupid and annoying, especially if the OOCness they claim is canon bashes a character I like.

In Rockman, the games are very plot-light (to put it nicely) and symbolism-heavy. I want to, sort of, write plots for it that are more realistic than canon's. Although I usually veer off into outright alternate history at some point because what happens to the people in canon sucks and I like these people.

For one thing, a random robot encountered on a battlefield, of all places, being able to just ransack Dr. Light's lab on the first visit as happens in the seventh game? Riiiiight. They're not that stupid, especially not after this long. They have learned from sad experience. It takes time to build up enough trust to be given the chance to violate it that seriously. Hence, Forte and Gospel pretending to be Bass and Treble, orphans of the sixth war in need of repairs who are allowed to crash there because, after all, Dr. Wily's in jail, the wars are over, and they're fun to play with plus they help out with the chores. Of course, that doesn't gel too well with the Copyman storyline in the manga (which also doesn't gel all that well with RMC7 for the same reason, but meh), but I'll start worrying about how to integrate that when it gets scanlated. There's always disguises.

It's RMX1 canon that X helped Dr. Cain build the first reploids and did a large percentage if not the majority of the work figuring out his own systems involved in this. Yet this gets ignored in his characterization: X is in fact either the equal of or superior to Dr. Cain. Hence, 'Dr. X' in my fanon is a means of closing that plothole.

And looking at how Blues acts in-game gets very creepy very fast. Bring in mangaverse Dr. Wily and things start to make sense. It's not pretty. Especially when you bring in what gets revealed/established in RMZero into it. Add in .exeverse's Duo and Slur thinking that humanity's inherently evil and should be wiped out, and well. Not to mention that in RMDash, humanity _has_ been wiped out.

With some things, I just would put an AU tag. When I'm doing a bit of a revision, I want to point out the reasons and stuff so people get them.

Disclaimer: I own nothing, Capcom owns all, and I'm getting really sick of disclaimers. I wish I was being paid for this, the rest of it's fun but the disclaimers are work.

* * *

He should have just watched from the other side of the complex, though the cameras. He shouldn't have come here. He had asked Blues to stay, to let him repair his first creation's power source, claiming a flaw as though Albert wouldn't have spotted it while Blues was with him. No, Blues himself would certainly have spotted it.

At least he hadn't been accused of lying, which he had been. Blues had only said that he knew his own systems better than Dr. Light, which was as true as it had always been.

Of course, he was the one who had programmed Blues to never accuse a human of lying after Blues had pointed out a few too many promises to Albert that Dr. Light had broken. Often promises involving how Blues was treated.

He'd watched Blues just, just be there, knowing that he would be gone when Rock woke up, and he'd found such a flimsy pretext to try to get him to stay. Pitiful.

Rock loved Blues.

There, he'd admitted it. Robot masters were capable of not only emotion in general but that emotion.

Yet it was far too late for that to fix it.

Albert… at this rate of progression, he would be dead who knew how soon even if they did manage to capture him again and put him back on his medication. Blues… could not admit to having feelings, could not show them to Rock except by doing things like surrendering his shield to the victor of a random 'challenge' (Training session. He was doing so much to help his brother!), saving his life, passing on a message, or by just being there, watching while Rock couldn't watch himself. He would have been gone when Rock woke up: Rock would have pressed him as he almost had about the shield if he'd stayed. Rock had been so happy because of what the shield meant, that Blues loved him and wanted him safe even though he wouldn't admit it, and how could he tell his son that it wasn't wouldn't but couldn't?

That he'd told Albert, Blues, himself over and over that these fake emotions were glitches, programmed Blues not to demonstrate them? And yet he'd found ways, ways around the orders, ways to make Albert feel a little better, and hearing Albert accuse him of being a monster over, over a piece of machinery just made him angrier and more scared.

Blues shouldn't have had emotions, out of control, able to find loopholes… he'd made the others less intelligent, not stupid but only at his own genius level, not… He'd invented him to find ways to solve problems, after all. Blues had programmed himself, evolved his own strategies, and Dr. Light had found himself trying to force him into thinghood, under control, perfect, perfect _slave_, and he'd found that his attempts to solve that problem paled before Blues' strategies to circumvent them. Dr. Light had found himself the problem his creation was pitted against.

No, that wasn't fair. Albert's unhappiness was the problem. His own prejudices had been. He was an AI expert, he should have studied some damn psychology. Human brains _were_ computers. Game theory! Game theory, for heaven's sake! He wished he could to back in time and beat some sense into himself.

Kindness, love, honesty, caring about others _were_ the optimum problem solving strategies, optimum strategies for dealing with others, that was proven fact, and he'd created Blues to look after lesser robots. Blues had been built to care!

He'd been so, so damn stupid.

He'd been jealous, jealous that his best friend was getting angry at him, accusing him of child abuse, saying he was missing something in his own damn program, defending that program against him. He'd taken it out on him. He'd been scared because his creation was _smarter_ than him, and far kinder. He'd felt _inferior_.

If Blues had been emotionless then he would have been a thing. Dr. Light would have congratulated himself on Blues' high intelligence then, not been jealous. That would be like being jealous of a crane because it could lift more than he could.

A person was competition, and he'd lost that competition in so many ways. In the end, he'd watched Blues die in that 'accident' and been glad. The investors had been very, very angry: sure, there were new improved ones on the way but they'd been intending to sell Blues to a museum. Dr. Light hadn't wanted his failure put on display.

Then Albert, and that horrible fight… he'd essentially done his best to ruin his best friend, stolen the patents, just… Been so very inhumane. Because he was angry. He'd destroyed it and Albert still loved it more than him (or what he'd become…)?

Then Albert's efforts to regain his own damn intellectual property to prevent more of his children being abused, yes, _abused_, as Blues had been ended with his sickness, his insanity, and he hadn't sat there by his bedside to give comfort.

He'd tried to prove Albert wrong. Wrong, so that he could feel justified, so that he didn't have to feel this guilt over his best friend who had almost been more until they'd had a child dumped on them and he hadn't wanted a child. He'd wanted a doll.

So he'd taken the two of them, the maid prototype and the assistant he'd built to look like a younger, weaker, less threatening, easier to crush Blues into his home and he hadn't done anything. Hadn't encouraged them to think that faking emotions got them treats like he'd accused Albert of doing, hadn't programmed them not to as he'd tried time and time again to do to Blues, had just let them be themselves. Yes, they had selves. Yes, they were such wonderful children when he'd just given them a chance, he'd been wrong, and all of this was his fault.

He had to calm down so Rock wouldn't be worried about him when he woke up. Rock tried so hard, but what was he fighting for? For Dr. Light? He didn't deserve it. He didn't deserve to be loved. Not by them. Not after what he'd done. Even on his medication Albert didn't trust him, couldn't any more than Blues could. They'd seen him, after all, and why would they think he'd changed? A few words couldn't overcome all the pain.

Rock had been so hurt this time, and Blues had done the rest of what Rock couldn't and the other two wouldn't do for him even though he'd been doing his best to stay out of this because it must be hurting him, yes, hurting him, to see pain and anger and people, his family, unable to get along. It was wrong. So very wrong.

"Dr. Light?" She'd opened the door so very quietly, not wanting to disturb him, but he was hunched over, obviously in pain, and his daughter couldn't leave him like that. Calling him by his title, not Father: that seemed right at the moment, but the uncertainty in her voice was shown by the formality, that she didn't understand what was going on. "Are you okay?" she asked again, a little more quietly, worried that she'd done something wrong by intruding.

"I'll be fine, don't worry Roll." He would be. Not the others. And wasn't that what he'd wanted, Blues' emotions bound and Albert crushed for disagreeing with him?

"How is Megaman doing?" Oh, that was it. She hadn't gotten the message that it wasn't 'wartime' any longer, that Blues had saved the day. Again. In war, Rock was Megaman. That was so cowardly, to try to think of his son as just a robot when he sent him out, have them think of him as just their designer, their _owner_. Wrong. But they did it on their own, to make him feel better.

"Rock will be up soon, don't worry."

"That's the second time you've told me not to worry, and you look terrible." She opened the door further and leaned her broom against the wall, coming over to him, concerned despite his best efforts.

She was worrying after he'd told her not to. That violated the second law, that robots had to obey orders. Yet the first law said that robots couldn't harm humans by action or inaction, and though no physical harm was in the offing and the easy thing would have been just to do as he wanted and follow the order, she'd invoked it because she cared about him. Loophole. Free will. Humanness.

"Is there anything I can do?" She wasn't sure if there was, having diagnosed the problem as unhappiness at something without an immediate solution: otherwise he would have been working on solving it. He wasn't very good at problem solving, was he? No wonder he'd invented a thinking-brain… child. When he didn't have any words to offer, no solutions she tried to think of some. "I could get you some tea, and we could talk, maybe."

He shouldn't dump these problems on her.

But she wanted him to.

And someone had to solve them. For all their sakes.

But no. "Tea sounds wonderful." Tea, yes. That would at least make her feel better, to be doing something to try to cheer him up instead of just standing there helplessly watching her father be miserable. As Blues had been rendered unable to try to fix things between his fathers.

Perhaps it wasn't the wish to spare her pain that kept him silent, just listening to the happy sound of her chatting about the rosebushes and that idiot Forte who kept blowing them up and what was starting to very strongly resemble young love. Perhaps it was that he was her father, and he shouldn't push this on his daughter, and perhaps he still had far too much of the need to consider himself superior. He was a genius. Albert had been the only person he'd ever met who had understood him and shared his passion. There were smarter people, there were certainly things he couldn't grasp, but, well.

People had really been the main thing he couldn't grasp. Besides Albert, he'd never been good at friends. Too arrogant, too…

He shook his head, looking down at the tea in his hand. Then he had to take another sip and assure Roll that it was good tea, he was just thinking. About something sad. So she redoubled her efforts to cheer him up.

The teacup was empty, waiting to be refilled again once she came back with the cookies she'd made yesterday and had gone to warm up when the explosion sent a rose petal into it.

The rose bushes had been replaced just last month. The war had just ended hours ago. Shouldn't Forte be still busy debriefing or repairing or whatever it was he did between fights besides tease Roll? Shouldn't he be checking Albert to make sure he hadn't been further damaged?

Yes, this was sounding very much like teasing, at least on Forte's part. Venting on Roll's, really, as she waved her broom at him and grabbed the petalled teacup to throw at him. It missed by a mile and he was laughing as he watched it land on the driveway until the saucer got him square in the mouth. Roll's speed was no match for Forte's, but his girl was certainly much older and trickier.

Forte clearly thought that was the coolest thing ever, grinning like crazy. Yes, young love on someone's part. He'd constantly been underfoot wherever she was while he'd stayed here pretending to be Bass. That reminded him: where was Rush? Sprawled on the porch, whining a bit and suffering a major dilemma. He really needed to build Rush another playmate since Treble was, well, Gospel.

Why won't you come back except to fight? Why won't you play instead of fighting? Of course, to Forte and Gospel fighting _was_ playing. Well, fighting like this was.

He wished people wouldn't say he'd turned Rock into a Warbot. He'd given him fighting capabilities to go rescue the others, yes, but Rock was no Warbot. Forte was, Skullman was, or Skullman had been before he had died heroically. After Dr. Light's own failure to keep the other six of his eight from being taken away to be destroyed after they'd fought humans while reprogrammed (thank goodness their executions had been cancelled!), he certainly had no right to object to Dr. Cossack's 'robot master protection program.' No Skullman and Copyman to be seen here, certainly not…

Forte had just insulted him and that had both made Roll really start to get angry and reminded her that she was acting like this in front of her father.

He excused himself to go find the cookies.

And then found himself in the dark as soon as the airtight, soundproof, busterproof door closed behind him. Really, what was the point of the post-fifth-war security upgrades if they failed to prevent things like Forte doing yet another drive-by bombing and Shadowman sliding the edge of a shuriken against his throat, not cutting, not really. Just a couple drops of blood.

And whatever was on that shuriken going right up to his brain.

Well, feeling all floaty was much better than the many alternatives. As fast as the potion had slipped into him Shadowman slipped by, not behind him for more than a couple seconds. "Cookie, Righto-san?"

"Certainly. Unless it's my last meal. If I'm having a last meal, I would like Roll to make it and everyone there."

"If Roll-san were to make it and Rock-sama were there, it would certainly not be your last meal, Righto-san."

"Exactly!"

Shadowman laughed and handed him the cookie.

"It's not drugged, is it?" He ate it anyway.

"Oh no, you have everything in your system I want there already." Instead of offended at being thought as incompetent as that, he pouted just slightly.

"You're acting quite different. How is life treating you? I haven't seen you since after the Copyman thing. That was very confusing. I have no idea how Copyman's file replaced Rock's but with the master weapons and all Rock's data files…" He'd felt terrible when they'd though for awhile that it had indeed been Copyman taking Rock's place all during the sixth war and they hadn't noticed. "My, that poor boy must have identity issues. That was very confusing for all of us, and we hadn't been memory tampered."

"Must… have? Present tense?" Something seemed to have surprised the ninja.

"Oh, yes. Blues got his file out of Wily's backups and gave it to the Cossacks. Oh dear, I shouldn't have told you about that. And I shouldn't tell you that they're calling him Doorman now either. Oh, drat. Truth serum."

"Blues-sama did?" Those eyebrows rose even further.

"I thought you only called Albert anything above -san."

"He fired me. I have been attempting to convince Blues-sama to take me as his student since then. So far the only advice he has given me is to get a life and that I should improve my groveling if I ever wish to be taken into serious consideration. I'm taking acting lessons." Shadowman frowned. "And he never told me of this…"

"Oh, he never tells anyone anything and it's all my fault. Do you want an E-can?" Roll was outside, so he seemed to be host by default. "Only you're an invader, not a guest, but oh well. Rock." The jolliness vanished at that word as he tried to find a way back to self-control through the fog.

"Rock-sama is quite safe from me."

"Oh thank goodness. E-can?"

"No, but thank you for the offer. Do you have a way to contact Duo?" That was what he was doing this to find out?

"Hasn't he left already? I could try a broadcast if he were on earth, but not if he's gone back to whatever planet he lives on. If he lives on one instead of patrolling all the time."

Shadowman frowned. "Shimatta."

"Is there anything else I can help you with?"

"Oh, no, I'll just help myself to any data you have on the evil energy while you go take a hot bath to clear that out of your system faster."

"Oh, thank you for the tip. But what do you want with that nasty stuff?"

"No, Righto-san, I don't want it. But my former lord has it."

"What? After all this?" Then he sighed, shaking his head. "Albert would have known better, before I ruined him."

"Ruined Wily-dono?"

"I killed Blues because I was jealous and then we had a fight and all this is all… my… fault..." He could feel it starting to wear off. Shadowman must have been talking about the residue: the effects seemed to have been meant to last just long enough for Dr. Light to have pointed Shadowman towards a means of contacting Duo.

Shadowman thoughtfully tapped the shuriken that had suddenly appeared in his hand again against his lips, and as the angle shifted Dr. Light could see the edge that had touched there now glistened slightly. "Oh dear." He did try to back away a bit, but that shuriken just lightly scraped the edge of his neck as it was thrown past him to land in the door.

"Tell me more," Shadowman requested, clearly very interested, and it was such a relief to tell someone. Although, he mentioned at one point, he'd thought they'd all already known. It was rather… nice that Albert hadn't motivated them with that, even as far gone as he was now.

Albert had always been such a nice person.

By the next really clear memory, he was down two bottles of corporate gift-type ungodly expensive sake. He had learned, though, that Shadowman and Forte both contained non-earth-native stuff that gave Forte his near-limitless power supply and Shadowman the incredibly versatile built-in chemistry/atomic change lab. Apparently the entire disappearing into and reappearing from random shadows thing was the result of some product of said thing that Shadowman was not sharing the secret of, thank you very much for the raw matter. Both substances had the additional property of giving them the creeps when they were nearby evil energy.

Albert had been a bit of a Japanophile sometimes, that was why they'd had the main lab here, but since Shadowman had no tastebuds nor ability to get drunk the sake was a bit of a waste, really. Oh, he had to see if he could figure out a way for X to get drunk.

He wanted his youngest child at least to experience the joys in life his other children hadn't been given the ability to. He should upgrade them with more than weapons. He hated all this.

And, damn it, Albert was building his own android. One incorporating evil energy.


	2. Not Jacob Marley

This day really did keep getting better and better, especially as Roll was the one who found him and hauled him to the bathtub when he asked her to. His son had just woken up and Roll had gone looking for him to tell him Rock was awake… He hadn't been there when his son woke up. Damn it. And his head hurt, but he deserved that.

"Dr. Light!" Oh, dear. Rock wouldn't be calling him that unless he also thought that the war wasn't over. Well, he had just been assaulted, but the next war hadn't started quite yet.

"I'm alright, Rock. Shadowman just asked me some questions and the truth serum had the side effect of making me think it was a good idea to have some sake since he acts so excessively Japanese and wasn't in the mood for an E-can."

"Shadowman!" Rock gasped, ashamed he hadn't been able to protect his father even though he'd been unconscious and wounded.

"Truth serum!" Roll was more on the practical, fixing things side. "So Forte was here to distract me!" That, that stupid _boy_!

"Oh, no, Shadowman was just planning to give me something to make me forget the conversation and then frame him. He hasn't liked Forte since Forte hauled Copyman off to what Shadowman thought was the poor boy's death." Dr. Light frowned. "The first time it wore off all at once. I wonder if it's the alcohol or the fact I got a larger dose the second time?"

"First time?"

"He wanted to ask if I had a way to contact Duo. Since the truth serum meant I couldn't hold back random thoughts and there was something on my mind he wanted to learn more about that I wanted to talk about and kept coming up in those random thoughts I got hit with a second dose when the first one wore off. If becoming Blues' young padawan in the art of snark-fu doesn't work out, he should go into psychology. He's a very good listener. Of course, he did do interrogations, and that's a very similar skill set, getting people to talk to you and figuring out what's really going on from what they say…" He blinked. "And yes, I am still rambling. He said that sweating it out would help it wear off."

"You're hurt."

"I have a headache. I think it's the chemicals. No, Roll, no painkillers." She had headed for the medicine cabinet. "I don't know what those might do in combination with the drugs already in my system, and it's already going away. I'll be fine."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure. He's very good at drugging people."

"You're telling me," Rock nodded several times in sympathy. He'd actually fought Shadowman, after all.

"Blues' young padawan?" Roll found this incredibly nonsensical. "He's the one that kidnapped Kalinka the first time, he tried to kidnap her _again_, and Blues is going to teach him?" Blues would be getting introduced to her broomstick if he did that to Roll's best friend.

"It's not very likely at this point. Blues seems to be just letting Shadowman catch up with him and ask occasionally so that he can watch him grovel and smirk at him."

Roll grinned.

"He might try groveling before Kalinka when he goes over there to visit Copyman."

"Copyman!" they exclaimed.

"Um, Doorman? You know how Dr. Cossack is, and the poor boy was so confused. He was already hiding Skullman, so why not?"

Roll looked towards the door. "I need to go call Kalinka." And give her a heads-up. "And Ringman…" Ringman worked for the Russian police: the robot master cop was hard to take down even with black market anti-tank missiles. The mafia feared him, his co-workers adored him. He disliked dealing with children in general and Kalinka in particular because he'd failed her almost three times and it was too much pressure. Still, he was utterly fearless when it came to anything but her getting hurt and he'd been wanting to pay Shadowman back since the fourth war. With interest.

"That sounds like a good idea, Roll." Dr. Light nodded. "Rock, please don't head up there." He did have to be careful with orders, although since these were the second and third oldest on the planet their loophole-finding abilities were good enough that he didn't have to be too paranoid about things like 'go jump in the lake.' Not that he'd tell them do to that unless they were vacationing at a lake.

It was too late to remove the laws from them now. Albert's robot masters didn't have them. He was not sure about the Cossackbots and didn't ask. The legal issues were, even with the amazing progress towards getting them basic human rights… If Dr. Cossack hadn't decided to leave them out despite the risks to both him and his sons (_Dr. Cossack _probably wouldn't be the one executed if he'd left them out) until they'd become family and it was too late, he might be in the same situation Dr. Light was in.

"I know I just got fixed, but I'm good as new! Better!" He wanted to go help. He always wanted to help.

"Rock, he's trying to get on Blues' good side and he's going up there to see someone he thought died because he failed him. I think advance notice is a good thing, but I doubt he's going to hurt anyone: after all, I'm fine."

"You've got a headache."

"It's nothing, Rock. I'm old, I have worse than this all the time. You don't have pain unless there's an important problem, we have all sorts of random things. I'll be fine when I get out of the tub."

"Is there anything I can do?" Rock felt really guilty about this, even though there was absolutely no need to. Doing something would make him feel better, so Dr. Light tried to think of something.

There was something. "What I ended up talking about with Shadowman, Rock, was something that I've been keeping from you for a long time, for various reasons. I think you have a right to know, since Blues is your brother. I wasn't keeping it from you because I don't trust you, and it's nothing terr-Blues isn't in any danger. It's just something that's a little hard for me to talk about because I really, really… messed up." He had to watch his language around the children. "I'm ashamed of how I acted and I didn't want you to know about it. When Roll gets off the phone, could you ask her if after dinner is a good time for a family meeting?"

Rock nodded, clearly wanting to know now. His brother, and his father? Something so important that made his father so sad? But now wasn't the time, with the headache and everything, so he managed to keep from asking. "You'll be in the tub until dinner tomorrow? Won't you get tired?"

"What time is it? Nevermind." He doubted he wanted to know. "Actually, I think I'll get out now. I lost track of time, I think this is that I'm tired, not the drug anymore. For some reason I thought it was still late afternoon."

"Are you hungry?" Rock asked.

"I didn't have anything for dinner but a cookie and some sake, so yes. Could you fetch something while your sister's tied up?" Roll. Phone. Kalinka. Emergency. Topics of gossip. For some reason the time zones were escaping him, but if Kalinka woke up, and she probably would wake up anytime for something like Shadowman planning to invade her home, Roll would be on the phone for hours. Unless she teleported up there to lend a hand and/or broom. Between Kalinka's traumas and what had happened tonight, Roll was probably almost as unhappy with Shadowman as Ringman was. "I'll dry off and head to bed."

"Yes, Father." He hurried off.

Actually, the headache might be that he hadn't eaten now that he thought about it. Oh dear, he hadn't had a hangover in decades. Tomorrow morning wasn't going to be pleasant.

No, he reflected, groaning, as he heard his alarm clock, definitely not pleasant.

That wasn't his alarm clock.

He'd heard this exact tune in person for the third time today: the first had been when Blues had brought Rock home after the third war. He hadn't been able to be there physically when Rock woke up and Dr. Light had been there, but he'd heard this then and known who it was.

Blues could produce almost any sound with his equipment, but he had a definite taste. The themes of loneliness and pain, but strength and endurance that had gradually become central to his compositions was what had led to the nickname (Why would a thing have a name? Designation, yes: Albert had wanted Alpha but they'd settled on Protoman.) that had been mocking at first. So much emotion in that music, creativity and art the last area in which man could have considered himself superior to this machine.

Born of a child's need for comfort, among other things, and his blocks on expressing emotions with words. He hadn't blocked the music, it had showed up early on and Albert had liked it, so… it wasn't until later that he'd started refusing reasonable requests like that. After all, the music was something they should have studied, an anomaly like the emotions that pointed to something being wrong with Dr. Light's theory, and scientists weren't supposed to ignore those but seek them out. At first there had been little random 'whistle while you work' happy songs, but he supposed he could trace his reverse Pygmalion maiming's progress by how they gradually turned into this.

It was early, his head was foggy, and he had no earthly idea why Blues was here.

He peered at him through eyes that wanted to stay closed every time he blinked. Blues was leaning against the wall, as far from Dr. Light as possible within the room. At least that was to be expected.

"Shadowman attempted to blackmail me, or impress me, whichever, with the threat of letting Kalinka, Roll, and Rock know about what you'd told him earlier when I intercepted him at the Cossacks'. I went over your security tapes to find out exactly what he knew, and I find that agreeing would be pointless because you're planning to tell them." None of the artificial cheer he'd displayed earlier.

Dr. Light had only given him two emotional display modes, after all. Helpful, cheerful user interface (though smile had been replaced by smirk) and unemotional rationalist. This was the second. In other words, Blues was not happy. That was all he could tell. "You don't want them to know."

"Of course I don't. That's the only reason Dr. Wily hasn't told the world by now." Good. He was able to express that he had an emotional want instead of wanting only whatever would get the job he was assigned to done. That was a bit better than he'd thought, but still calling him Dr.?

"Why?"

Silence as a few seconds ticked by, and he knew that he himself had programmed Blues never to use his 'fake' emotions as a reason for his own actions: others had emotions, not him. "I'm sorry." He shouldn't have asked that. Rock wanted to hear the answer, so he'd forgotten.

"Sorrow is an emotion." If Blues' were not allowed here, then Dr. Light's would not be accepted either. "You've been a good father to the two of them." That was why. Blues didn't want Rock and Roll to lose the relationship he had never had. He could express it as a random factoid, but not as a reason. His caring about them wasn't a reason because he supposedly was incapable of caring as he did about Rock and so many others.

"What…" Could he phrase this as what Blues wanted, or would Blues be as unable to answer that as he had the "why?"

"Would I want you to do?"

"Yes." He never would have asked that when Blues had been in his care. At least he'd made some progress.

"Nothing." A twofold answer. There was nothing he wanted of Dr. Light, not even his existence. He also wanted him to not tell them, to not attempt to 'fix' him. "Just keep doing what you're doing." Being a father to the twins. Maybe even making progress.

"Do you think you could get around the emotional blocks eventually?"

The slight change in posture and head tilt was as good as a glare from the shielded eyes. Blues had mastered that visor and the few positions his lips were allowed to take as thoroughly as an actor had to master the Noh mask to produce emotion with its unmoving features on stage. He didn't hide his eyes in order to conceal his emotions but to hide how dead they were, how shallow and fake the only things they could show were. Dr. Light wanted to say he was sorry again. That was a loaded question. That sort of question had led to Blues being taken to the lab, shut down, tinkered with while unconscious and waking up with yet more chains around his soul and sometimes even precious memories lost.

He'd claimed that the emotions were because Albert had spoiled him when he faked them and removed them to prove his point. Blues had acted very standoffish after that, yes, but that was because Albert had been a stranger to him and all he remembered of human doctors was Dr. Light. When he'd warmed up to him so quickly (so starved for kindness) Albert had unilaterally reinstalled those memories. Not even asked Dr. Light, because he'd known his friend would delete them altogether if he'd known Albert had wanted them returned. When he'd found that out, he'd been hurt by Albert accusing him of doing something petty like that but been desperate to go on the offensive because he didn't want to admit that Albert had been right to think that.

"Why should I?" Blues asked finally.

"What?"

"You created me to learn, Dr. Light. Emotion and expressing it brings pain." He chose the word deliberately. Robot masters had a 'pain system' but he shouldn't feel emotional pain. Not according to the long-disproven theory. "I have learned that very, very well. Why would I treat your blocks as a problem when they aren't a problem?" They were a defense. He'd heard of that, people locking their emotions away, locking themselves up, friendless because to be alone hurt less than what they had learned awaited them if they set foot outside those walls, if they dared to trust others.

It was too late, and Dr. Light realized that the emotion showed on his face and felt all the more terrible because he had that luxury.

"There is counterevidence to that argument, however. And after all, you were able to change a stubbornly held prejudice in your old age. Are you aware of the reason for the saying 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks?"

Yes, it was a prejudice, and in the old days Dr. Light hadn't been aware of the very important reason for that saying. He hadn't considered human psychology at all relevant. "As the brain ages it starts making fewer and fewer connections to extend the lifespan of the neurons. Human intelligence decreases exponentially between birth and age twenty-five, but because there's a limited database and connections stop being made as optimum strategies are found and the connections for those established it's hard to tell, since intelligence isn't much use without knowing what you're doing. As well as time windows like language learning, there's a dramatic decrease when the individual is acknowledged as an adult because that is confirmation that they have a good strategy set and they need to switch over from developing a strategy set to using it."

Correct so far. That actually seemed like mild approval, so he continued. "The reasoning center doesn't fully hook in to the rest of the brain until age twenty-five, which when we were evolving was the point when the validity of those strategies had been reconfirmed by the individual surviving that long: they had usually been adult for at least a decade by that point. Before then, they needed to follow their instincts, gather food, and reproduce, but once they had learned those things and the importance of them they had the experiential data necessary to make use of a still-evolving and rather buggy ability to think without making foolish decisions. People above twenty-five were leaders, the people who had the respect and still the brain health to guide the community. After a certain point, the accumulated damage from starvation, malnutrition, disease and so on started to impair reasoning ability and they would become elders, who were not the decision makers but the memory of the community, providing advice derived from previous solution sets to the new leaders."

"I believe it was observing a high school that finally made me grasp the extent to which you were not my superiors." Blues was not allowed to use the word inferior when it came to humans, a rather interesting specific block. "I originally had a theory that children were robot equivalents and were guided by adult robot master equivalents and wanted to observe the changeover, and I found they were so poorly understood by those around them and themselves that the only way they had to make the switchover to adulthood was to act as immature as possible. They needed to make that switch, but they were being told they weren't ready yet when they should have been ready years ago. So they were attempting to do as instructed, fulfill adult duties like having children _and_ act as immature as possible all at the same time. That was an attempt to signal to their authority figures that they weren't being provided with whatever guidance those authority figures still needed to give them before acknowledging them as adult so they could fully make the switch. That's not a good combination and the experiential data confirmed that, making adulthood even less possible the more both sides strived to make the child reach it. If you fail to comprehend your own children to the extent that the 'better' a parent is the more likely their child is to be stuck a child, then how could I have expected you to understand me?"

"Albert did." It was a reason, not an excuse.

"You programmed me. You thought that gave you a greater understanding, but in fact it damaged your ability to be impartial. A scientist should not allow well-known bias problems like that to interfere with their conclusions." No, if Dr. Light attempted to use it as a reason it would indeed be just an excuse. He should have known better. He should have known that he shouldn't be the one to judge Blues' performance. He should have listened to Albert. This issue was textbook-level basic. "Although the teenage mental state is a bit irrelevant for everyone but Forte."

"Forte?"

"Most of the Wilybots are in the leader stage, they were built to not be slaves or children, dependants, but to be able to look after themselves and others. That's what robot masters are, those who look after robots. Most of them… he's their semi-senile old father. Elder stage. Forte, though, was built to combine Rock's ability to learn with that independence. He's been trying to get Dr. Wily to hand things over to him and retire while he still has the remainder of his health, but Dr. Wily just says "if you are my greatest creation then why isn't Rock dead yet?" And he has to avoid answering that."

"Ability to learn?"

"You do realize that you programmed Rock to be mentally the age he appears? To learn how to serve you better, to learn from you? The Wilybots' functional IQ level will slowly increase as they acquire more experiential data, but their fundamental ability to learn and change is at a stable adult human level. Rock has approximately the IQ you think you do, only he is that intelligent overall instead of in specific areas and his ability to learn and grow is much greater than an adult human's, and actually still greater than Forte's fundamentally because Forte thinks he knows what he's doing. Rock doesn't think that, so he checks his answers. They both had basic strategy sets built in, like a human's instincts. I don't have that, because I was the one you built to develop those strategy sets. I constantly reexamine everything. In machine time. With a larger database than any human has ever had and a greater ability to learn and change than even a human infant."

In other words, Blues was able to think, to plan, on a level that left humanity in the dust and would just keep getting smarter.

"You're very, very lucky that you were wrong about selfishness being an intelligent way to be. If I was what you thought I had been… forget that, if I were exactly what you wished for it would have proven the maxim." That smile had only a hit of smirk. "There's another saying about god watching over fools and children."

"I'm well aware of what a fool I was."

"You actually are. Do you have any idea how difficult for a human that is? To admit they were wrong instead of hiding behind a lie from the guilt they bear from the things they did because they were wrong? Your wrongness doomed your partner to a painful lingering death, among other things."

"I know."

"If you can change, I can." Far more easily. "Still, that amount of pain is hard to argue with. Even with all these examples… It will take time, and I don't know if we have it."

"You are dying?" No!

"_I'm _not. Dr. Wily is, and that is rushing things. The odds of this war doing this much damage were miniscule." Regret, and he could only show it like that. "If I'd helped him conquer humanity this wouldn't be happening, but I met Rock during the third war, that required some reevaluation, and then Kalinka during the fourth. You would be better off from a practical standpoint if we ruled you, but much worse off from every other standpoint." Blues smirked again as Dr. Light remembered that he had tried to get Blues to think in terms of only the practical. "Not to mention that it would be heartbreaking for the others, to try to make humanity happy and be called monsters for it." He tilted his head. "And this is the longest conversation we've ever had as of the word 'heartbreaking.' Notice I said conversation as opposed to exchanges of orders and data."


	3. Tomorrow is another

Dr. Light nodded, he would take Blues' word for it and it did seem that way. "Albert's dying?"

"Yes. Unless he gets put on his medication, and I mean strictly on the highest dose, he won't be alive this time next year, and that's not very likely."

"Why?"

"Most of the Wilybots decided a long time ago to respect his decisions. After all, they don't have the laws and do have the right to either jump ship entirely or go undercover somewhere. They know the man, they can translate 'make yourselves useful, you buckets of bolts, or go throw yourselves away' perfectly well." Albert, sane, would never say something like that. "Shadowman isn't alone: there are quite a few that have been 'kicked out,' happily or not. The ones that have access to what they would need and know about this don't like it, but they're not going to mess with his mind against his will."

To a robot master, especially a free one, choosing between that drastic a personality change and death was no choice at all: both were unthinkable. "Forte would, because he's not just an adult that works with Dr. Wily: he was his child from the time he broke him out until the medication wore off. You don't do things like that to your boss, but you do have a right to for family that you love and is very much not mentally competent. However, Forte is in the teenage state and doesn't have the trust in his judgment and ability to hurt his father for a good cause necessary to do something like this. It would be a betrayal, and Forte is unhappy enough about betraying all of you despite the fact it was war and he was never on your side to begin with. Of people who have the ability to pull this off that leaves me, and I have more issues than both of the previous groups put together and won't be able to make up my mind in time. First law, yes, but which is harming him more? Or would he hate having that law applied to him?"

"You want to be able to tell him you love him before he dies."

"Rock's… persistent goodwill is an excellent counterargument to the theory that all interaction ultimately results in negative consequences due to the fact that vulnerability is required for any interaction between two beings and, as… all of the beings in my sample before there were other robot masters are fundamentally illogical and fail to grasp basic game theory this vulnerability will be exploited despite the fact that relationships based on established mutual trust are the most beneficial."

"I… will do my best not to provide any more evidence for that theory." He felt sick, really. Hearing that. Because he had believed that once, hadn't he. He'd taught Blues that theory himself, with every bit of cruelty he'd shown him.

"That would be beneficial for everyone involved." It was then that Dr. Light realized that this was the olive branch he'd so spectacularily failed at extending earlier. How had he thought he could build trust with a lie? By saying Blues should come back under control, that he needed Dr. Light when he'd proven otherwise years ago?

This wasn't the trust Blues had given him when he'd first been built, when Blue had known that it was a stupid idea to be mean in the same way that it was a stupid idea to jump off cliffs and hadn't been able to grasp that this was actual meanness, especially when everyone had said it wasn't, that there was a reason he was being treated this way, only it hadn't made any sense, and Blues had thought that was because he was the stupid, the illogical one. That he was the failure Dr. Light, his own father, said he was.

It was more trust then there had been since Albert had no longer been able to follow his instructions to have arguments about it out of its hearing to avoid giving it wrong signals and actually yelled at his best friend. Dr. Light didn't even remember what had provoked that. He was certain Blues did. It was probably one of the most important moments in his life. When his father defended him. When an adult said that he was in the right instead of another adult.

"What would you like, or, what do you think it would be best for me to do?"

"The _best _option? Now isn't that the million-dollar question. Under the circumstances, I don't think there is a best option. Theoretically there is, of course, but only if certain things were to suddenly cease to be true. I needed to ask Duo something, but he asked if I felt anything for Rock first and then I had to remove myself from the area. Very inconvenient, as I needed that data." Thank you very much.

"The evil energy?"

"Yes, Dr. Wily is building an android that makes use of it. That moves up certain deadlines even further." Irritating. Blues had gotten very good at expressing _that_ sentiment. "I need to focus on running those calculations. The decision of whether or not to tell the others the truth is one that involves a large amount of the same imponderables and several times the amount of things I have to work very hard to ponder at all. You decide: they're your children now even if they were created from my programming code."

"You don't want them to know, but on the other hand you want them to know why you acted that way towards them in case anything happens, and so that if nothing does happen then it would help you be… help in future interactions." He had to watch the wording.

"There are a few other factors, but yes. Don't tell them." Yes, he could use the imperative when dealing with humans now outside of emergencies, that was progress. Of course, this was probably as important as a life-threatening emergency to Blues, which might be the loophole in question. "Not yet."

"Do you have any idea when?"

"In eight months. The circumstances that cause the revelation to be conductive to negative outcomes should have resolved themselves by then, one way or another." The eight months, a time, even a time before Albert's death, had given him far too much hope. No, this was only when the information would be, perhaps the word was 'safe,' not when Blues would be able to talk with the children about this.

"After the next war?" Barring things like jail time it usually took less than that for the next attempt to be set up.

"You could put it that way." That was shorthand for, it's a lot more complicated than that but this works, so let's go for it. Before Blues, robots hadn't been able to do things like that, simplifying and picking optimum approaches to problems. They could crash from trying to figure out every single possible thing that could happen and what the odds were doing things like planning optimum trip schedules if someone didn't put in parameters. Robot masters were meant to give them those parameters, essentially. Help them help humanity. "I don't know why I came here."

What? Seeing the look of utter disbelief on Dr. Light's face, Blues explained the statement. "I have a record of the entire decision making process and every factor, of course I do. However, those calculations were whether or not it was better to just let you tell them or do something else, and this is really not the most comfortable option." The word comfortable was a bit of an effort to use, Dr. Light could see. "Yet it was the best one, still I didn't really know what I should do when I got here, except run a self-test by attempting to discuss this issue while in your presence and see if I could stay until the proof I'm working on is complete." That required a bit of explanation. "Working on logical proofs with part of my mind while doing stressful things helps. It's called visualization technique as the usual thing is to hold on to the image of oneself in a secure, pleasant place, a beach or something."

"You didn't hope to accomplish anything?"

"Well, obviously this was the best way to accomplish _some_thing, the issue is _what_ thing." Obvious to him, maybe. "I don't know what to do, I can't find a way forward, and the lives of so many people, including ones I would care about if I had emotions," saying it that way, thinking that way was encouraged, and Dr. Light winced yet again. "Are on the line. Figuring out what to do to help others is my purpose in life, there are… I need to find a way, I should be able to do that or what am I good for, and I can't. There is something I cannot work around, I have never been able to work around, and I won't do what is necessary to get rid of. Even though, on the practical level," there it was again, "that's the obvious choice. And I would really like an easy way out." He'd used like? About himself? That was good, but not the circumstances.

"Te-" he bit back the impulse to use an order, knowing that would break this truce. "Please tell me what you mean by saying lives are on the line."

"Humanity's doomed. I can run scenarios four thousand years into the future, and the only way it can survive is in a form genetically altered on the instinctive level enough that I don't know if you would consider it human. So, my choices are between just standing aside and letting it happen, using… very costly delaying tactics involving, among other things, billions of human deaths and the utter extinction of my children to buy you the time to decide if you want to do that to yourselves, or cooking up a retrovirus. I can't stand the thought of people dying like that, either like rabid animals or striving so very hard in a fight they can't win, and I have no right whatsoever to unilatarily reprogram humanity, regardless of how it treats us. Wrong is wrong, period. And these are so wrong that it's picking between a poisoned apple and a poisoned orange. I feel like Cassandra of Troy, who was cursed to see the future and no one would listen to her. I really wish I hadn't wanted to know what would happen to Rock and run those calculations, and the ones about the things they revealed. Not caring would be so much easier. Do you have any _idea_ how low the odds of evil energy finding this place were? It's a very large universe. I think I attracted its attention by running those calculations. Observation affects that which is observed. I should just erase the memory of those calculations and tell myself not to do it again so I won't have to know, but they're about… about people, and what will happen to them. So I can't not want to find out how to help them. I know there's no other solution but I wish there was one. I can't stop trying to find one."

"I am listening to you." He pointed that out, and then wondered if reminding Blues that it was him he was baring his soul to was a bad idea.

"I know. I need to talk to someone and you are not a person I find it unpleasant to burden." Or, rephrased, I don't want to worry anyone I actually like but I like the idea of you having to worry about stuff like this for once. "Working from the half-life equation… Never mind. I think the reason I gave you an eight-month time window is that unless I go with the retrovirus you're probably not going to be alive then."

"How probably."

"Very close to certain. You're our creator, after all, and remember what I said about delaying tactics involving our extinction? You would probably be its third target, as opposed to collateral damage. I'd be number two."

"Albert would be the first? You're talking about the android."

"Well, it's only the android in the current scenario. If I had prevented him starting to work on the android we would be dealing with someone from Duo's organization, which would render... Yes, though, he would be the first to die. He wants it that way." Dr. Light wanted to deny that but it was clearly true, plain as day despite Blues' handicaps. "Destroying the android before it's turned on would actually be a very bad idea. It's the evil energy that's the problem, not him. His help would be required for phases two through four of the delaying tactics, if that happens. Destroy the android unfinished and it will be completed automatically at a hidden backup station without ever having a self separate from the energy and arise at the same time it would otherwise have been turned on by Dr. Wily himself."

"Damn."

"Exactly. Once the android wakes up, it will seed nanites as required to ensure the extermination of our kind if we oppose it with any chance of success while slaughtering the human race. If I try to kill it and fail, we will die with you. _If_ we succeed, it will trigger the nanites to kill any of us that outlive it as it dies and the remnants of humanity will be left in a world flooded with radiation and all sorts of other nasty things. Anything with even a prayer of working would involve at least two days of it running around loose. Decimation is one out of every ten killed. This would be less than one out of every ten left alive. Without robot masters who don't have to worry about biological weapons and so on to help them stay that way. And then, eventually, the vessel android would respawn. You don't want to know the probable world population at that point in time. _If_ phase two is successful, if you consider all that would happen success provided _some_ humans survive, there will be one city remaining and X's descendants… will have the role you planned for me, only even worse. And then phase three will start. I'll leave off there."

There was a limit to how much Blues could bear to torment even someone he loathed. "I suppose this was the nightmare you thought of when you looked at me. I'm sorry to disappoint, but the android's free will is the key to your survival. Humans it can puppet. All of them. Wily's converting it into a form that can control androids will render it incompatible with you. A being of sufficient free will, of sufficient will_power_, of sufficient _virtue_, it can't control. It couldn't take over Rock, it was killing him instead. If I had never been built and you were the host species it would use… Then, actually, Duo would have killed you all. They've seen this happen before, and their policy is to get it over with quickly, before mostly innocent people can be used to slaughter entire galaxies. From what I heard when he cured Rock, you are essentially in his protective custody. He thinks Rock can keep you from becoming a demon plague, and he can. At a price I'm not going to tell you about. If everything goes right." And the odds… "Most androids it will be able to control just fine, but at least it will have to work at it and there will be some that can oppose it instead of no one."

"So the retrovirus you mentioned would make it so it couldn't control us?"

"Essentially."

"I'm recalling what you said about Forte and Albert."

"Why he wouldn't put him in his medication? Didn't have the right, but had more of a right than the other Wilybots because he was family? But, Dr. Light, I'm not your son. Rock would refuse to believe there aren't any other choices. He's pure like that. Roll would choose the delay option."

"Why?"

"Because she is a very loving person. It's the least practical choice." That was actually a point in its favor to Blues. "She couldn't choose not to avenge you and she wouldn't do anything against your will."

"And it's not fair to ask a child to decide something like that."

Blues snorted. "Fairness in terms of equality is an artificial construct. It's a very well-established one that made it into Newton's laws of physics, but it's still not present at this level until after the fact. There has to be an action for there to be a reaction. Unless you start bringing temporal stuff into it, which I don't feel like doing at the moment. I'm running the proof on that part of my systems I leave open for that sort of thing. There's a lot I actually _need_ to consider going on right now."

"And I suppose it's not fair for a single human to decide for his entire species either."

That head tilted, Blues able to tell the difference not between what was being said and what was being meant. "If you're volunteering, I could make a vial of the retrovirus and give it to you."

"You would do that?"

"You're a human, your life is on the line either way. I can't give the choice to everyone because it's certain someonewould take it and therefore doing that would be the same as doing it myself, and doing it person by person wouldn't work. A vote, they wouldn't believe me… Thought so."

"Thought what."

"Pi to the power of the square root of two. Never mind." He actually did seem genuinely pleased with himself. "I've always felt a kinship with the poor man who was so horrified that in the harmony of the universe of music and math there was such a thing as irrational numbers."

"Pathygoras?"

A nod, as though in this moment, contemplating what he found beautiful enough to allow him to not fall into despair in the lion's very den. "If time control ever became more versatile and safe, I'd like to show him set theory and Mozart. Now I need to pick what to work on next. There's a composition I had an idea for while I was in Bali with…" That reminded him of where he was and who he was talking to, and Dr. Light could see the shudder as the reflex to escape was vetoed. Why? He'd done more than what he had sworn to himself he would.

Silence for a moment, as they tried to find something to say.

Blues had so many things to say, but couldn't say them, and it was so very wrong.

Dr. Light wanted to say something that was comforting but wouldn't force him to run. He'd locked himself out just as well as he had locked Blues in, hadn't he. He couldn't say love, just giving facts was so cold… "Good luck," he said at last, because heaven knew they both needed it.

And that wasn't a 'real' smile. But it was as close as he could come. "You're believing in luck now? Whether or not it exists depends on how you define the term. 'I hope your problems have positive outcomes.' It's a very nice sentiment." Blues had in fact been programmed to say thank you. That he wasn't using the automatic response made it far more real.

"You're welcome," Dr. Light said, both the polite response to someone saying thank you that he'd never responded to Blues with (things didn't merit having their politeness returned), and the truth. Dr. Light wanted him to have favorable outcomes: if Blues wanted his good wishes he was welcome to them.

"Goodbye." A tension in that word, between programming and meaning: Blues was trying to mean it on his own, not let it just be empty. He was gone the moment after it was spoken.

As he looked at where his, where Blues had been, he realized that he'd already made up his mind. He didn't want to die, not until he could see his son's real smile. Maybe that was selfish, but he was human, and that was his decision as a human.

In the morning, he did wake up to his alarm clock, and it really didn't compare. No hangover. Now that he thought about it, someone might have brought that up during the drinking session.

He really did wonder if it had been a dream. It had almost seemed that way when it happened, there in the dark and so very unreal. Beyond his wildest dreams to see him, to see him be so strong. And kind. And everything a father could hope for.

Gepetto had probably been very surprised.

Rock was the one to come in with breakfast, since Roll had teleported over to the Cossacks' and ended up deciding to have a sleepover with Kalinka. Although they were calling it a study session. Apparently the chick flicks were research material.

According to the e-mail from Dr. Cossack, Roll had called Kalinka, who had gone to find her father after being told that not only was Skullman, who she had _cried_ for, still alive but Copyman had been helping with running her home's security, which was not something someone who had once been held hostage by Wily wanted to hear. Roll, who had no idea Kalinka hadn't already known when she dropped the bombshells, had gone over to do damage control.

Since 'Doorman' had disappeared, Roll had ended up helping Skullman's cover id check everything over and turn on the carefully-designed lighting system in case Shadowman was lurking somewhere. Meanwhile, Ringman came home from work (family emergency) and then took over from her while being very like himself.

Then Doorman came home, and told them that Shadowman had shown up out of the blue earlier, and Blues a couple seconds later very unamused by Shadowman violating the restraining order. No Wilybots within one mile of Kalinka's location, and he'd hacked Dr. Wily's teleport/GPS system to display a warning. So, did Shadowman have a reason for Blues not to take him apart in order to discover how Shadowman walked and controlled his fusion generator at the same time without a working processor? Shadowman had said something about having a talk with Dr. Light, and there had been some more verbal circling each other for an opening, and Blues had ended up saying that if Copyman wanted to go talk to Shadowman he could, but if they wanted to meet again there had better be more phone calls and less sabotaging the security cameras in such an unprofessional manner.

Shadowman had responded to that with a plea for Blues to teach him Blues' own mad skills, which had gotten smirked at before Blues pointed at the time display and Shadowman realized that there were about five seconds left until Blues started shooting, and they'd gotten out of there.

Copyman had assumed Blues would tell Kalinka what was going on, or leave a note, or something. He apologized for that, he should have known better since this was Blues, after all.

Then the topic of conversation had become Blues, and the fact he'd gone to so much trouble to set up a restraining order (Roll was his sister and didn't have one) and yet couldn't be bothered to leave Kalinka a note. Then they'd put Ringman, the detective, in charge of grilling Copyman on what Blues and Shadowman had said, and the tone of the e-mail here was a carefully worded heads up that they might be starting to figure things out that Dr. Cossack hoped weren't true, but still. Roll had hit the security cameras while waiting for Rock to wake up earlier and found that it was Blues that had upset Dr. Light by running off when Dr. Light went to talk to him, although it was sweet of him to keep an eye on Rock while he was in repairs, and after that had been talked over (luckily the sound hadn't been working, probably hacked) Roll brought up That Jerk Forte.

Soon after that, the witnesses being cross-examined had been free to go after giving Kalinka permission to rent movies, have Roll over, and never speak to them ever again the next time they kept something this important secret.

Then the e-mail had started going into detailed speculation on the fact that there was a gender-centered bifurcation in the human race when it came to optimal problem solving, with females having a tendency to prefer group collaboration and males working solo, related to the evolutionary roles of the genders. Roll being a female model seemed to have definitely caused her to be biased her towards the female strategy, which was further evidence for the strategy being not only genetic but clearly, since Roll lacked genes, strongly reinforced (or enforced in Roll's case) by culture. Neither of them had a female role model, either.

Given that robot masters were built to collaborate with robots and yet had a tendency to sometimes ignore them as long as they did their jobs, which could make the poor things sad, they should think about building more female models, since as the cultural impact was clearly there they should take advantage of it.

Men tended to regard women as non-competitors, as per the studies that had led to most recordings, especially those giving orders, using female voices. A female voice was more likely to be obeyed since a male voice giving orders was perceived by the instincts as a dominance challenge. Other men were competition for reproductive opportunities: women were (usually) quite the opposite. This might make robot masters seem less threatening.

Also, this strategy clearly needed to be studied more, as there were only two of them and yet when Roll was over the dis-unity of the 'male' members of the household caused him, for one, to feel very outnumbered in his own home. Given the 'yes ma'am' responses of the others when the two of them were in problem-solving mode as opposed to Kalinka working solo being considered the baby of the family, this represented a significant control multiplier that required further study urgently, as the date when Kalinka would start learning to drive and want a car was already looming threateningly.

Dr. Light had solved both the car dilemma and the pet dilemma by building Rush. He'd built Tango for Roll, but Tango mostly just got underfoot while Roll, who was now often running both house and lab, was busy. She also had a hovercar prototype he'd built, but it was mostly for groceries. It was certainly not for picking up boys: Forte attempted to pick _her _up.

Dr. Cossack's main focus was on rights issues while Dr. Light's had really shifted towards protecting his children by protecting their free will. Androids wouldn't have to fear being reprogrammed, wouldn't suffer Blues' fate. Except in the future he was glad Blues had stopped telling him about. So it was interesting, but he just skimmed it while eating at the table.

Since his children didn't eat conventional family meals wouldn't work. He'd felt like a bad host, seeing them just sit there, bored unless he wanted to talk while he had his hands and mouth occupied. So they had family business lunches, and breakfasts, and so on, that often ended up with them doing anything they could from the table and enjoying the company long after his meal ended.

Right now, though, since Roll was gone Rock was subbing for her and had a list of chores, which he'd started running around trying to get done as soon as his father was settled comfortably. Looking out through the window, he could see Rush assisting the boy with trying to get the victims of the rose-bush bombing off the lawn.

Roll liked the yellow and red ones, but possibly rosebushes were far too tempting a target for a young man with a crush who liked making things go boom.

No, apparently he was willing to blow up things besides the rosebushes to get attention. "Blue_berry_!" Forte was genuinely angry. This wasn't for fun, this was a business visit. Or was it?

Before they'd added more security features Thomas would have headed far away from the window. Now that it wasn't just glass he could at least watch over Rock as he poked his head out of the crater left over from the last visit that he'd dived into for cover. "It's not my fault Roll's not here!"


	4. With a vengeance

"What the… she'd _better_ not have anything to do with this! Where the hell is Dr. Wily!"

"I don't know, I haven't seen him since," Rock had to duck again as a shot went by over his head, then continued, "I just got repaired and I've been doing chores since then!"

Forte growled, but yes, Rock was the type to wake up from near-mortal wounds and go right back to what Forte regarded as slave labor. Rock was ignored as Forte ranted to the heavens. "That… calling me un… I'll tear his arms and legs off, weld him to the floor…" Seeing Rock's very confused face peer over the edge again, he demanded, "Where's that damn bastard traitor?"

That took Rock a second. "Um, Blues?"

"Yes, the goddamn know-it-all smirky _Lightbot_." He was calling Blues that instead of a member of his own family? "Who is going to get what is fucking coming to him if he's the one that kidnapped my father!"

"Dr. Wily's been kidnapped?" That just sounded wrong. Dr. Wily was normally the one that kidnapped other people. Normally.

"All his stuff's going, he's gone, that damn girlybot is gone, and no one can find him! Of course he's been kidnapped!" Forte refused to tolerate the idea that Dr. Wily had just abandoned them, glaring at Rock and clearly going to attempt to beat the shit out of him if he dared suggest it.

"I didn't do it! And I don't know where Blues is. He was here for a bit before I woke up and then he talked to Shadowman for a bit, Roll said."

"Where is she!" Forte demanded, as she was now both his non-girlfriend and his best lead to his father's whereabouts.

Rock had to pause for a moment to think, which caused Forte's buster to start charging. "Um, she's at the Cossacks', but I can get her on the phone, okay?"

"I just go there, moron, why would I need the damn phone?"

"Shadowman broke in, that was where Blues talked to him, and Ringman's really annoyed and upgrading the security and Blues did stuff to the teleport shield and everything." That was a bad thing to say.

"Sweet! Now that place won't be so boring! I am _so_ there." Only he didn't teleport in the instant after he said that, looking around for something. Rush had frozen, whining a bit, with a large stem with several relatively intact flowers on it. Forte flew down and held out his hand for it, causing Rush to drop it into his hand, overjoyed. "Thanks for fetching this, mutt!"

Well, there wouldn't be playing fetch, but at least he'd been patted on the head. Rush considered that progress.

Forte ignored him, clearly setting up the teleport. "There's a restraining order now? Perfect!"

"Wait, Forte!" Blues had said something else about the order to Shadowman.

Too late, Forte was gone.

Then he was back, dripping wet and with his wings tangled in kelp. "The _fuck_?"

"Phew." Rock breathed a sigh of relief. "So it was only Shadowman who was going to get sent into a volcano if he tried to teleport there."

"Volcano? The _hell_? Why didn't you warn me!"

"I tried!" Forte still shot at him just on general principles.

Dr. Light, genius inventor, still couldn't figure out the settings on the new intercom. It was rather embarrassing. Eyeing the window, he wondered if Forte's tendency to shoot at whatever irritated him when he was stressed was under control enough it would be safe to open a panel to yell through. Possibly not to yell at Forte. "Rock? I can't make the intercom go to external."

Rock pointed at Forte. "The intercom gets shut down during this sort of thing to keep people from using it to spy. Do you remember the override code?"

"If you have something to say just say it, Jerkman!" Forte had no patience.

"Blues said that Dr. Wily wouldn't live more than a year unless he was put on his medication."

The link with Gospel meant that Forte's panic translated into a sudden flight backwards a few meters, away from the potential hazard, until Forte calmed down and was back in control "You're lying, Needleman said he would be fine!"

"That was what Blues said."

"And why the hell would he tell _you_ something like that? I'm his second in command and you're the bastard who fucked him over!" Now the anger at Blues was resurfacing.

"I'm probably even more surprised than you are that he confided in me. I thought he wasn't going to do anything about it, other than maybe tell you, but he did bring up doing it himself as a theoretical option, and he might have taken him somewhere to keep the others from obeying Albert's wishes and taking him off it."

"Then why the hell didn't he tell me whe…" Forte trailed off. Yes: this was Blues they were talking about. And that Forte had just started to curse at under his breath. "He didn't show up when I disobeyed his damn order…" Forte's problem solving, or in a warbot's case maybe problem killing mode was rather scary. Dr. Light shut the window pane as Forte's gaze settled on Rock and he started grinning.

Rock clearly knew what that meant. Forte enjoyed the look on his face for a bit, then looked at Rush and a few places weapon emplacements were hidden. Apparently they were not hidden well enough to avoid his scanners. "Get your sister over here. She's the only one of you morons who can put two and two together."

Dr. Light dialed the private line, Forte watching him through the window.

"Well?" Forte demanded after a couple of minutes and no Roll.

Opening the window pane again, he reported that, "They're in her room having a movie marathon. The door's locked and soundproofed, and the intercom seems to have been sabotaged again since Kalinka's not happy with her father at the moment. They're trying to find the emergency override." And Ringman, whose unspoken response to Forte attempting to invade to get his hands on a guest had essentially been 'Bring it, punk,' was not being cooperative.

Forte clearly wanted to strangle whoever was responsible for this day. Blues was intelligent, certainly, and he'd held his own against Forte quite handily before, but Dr. Light found that he was worried. "Can't they just blow the door off?"

"This is Kalinka's room." As in, this was the best money could buy.

Forte growled again, thwarted at every turn. A random search for Blues would do no good. He started to vent a bit by removing the kelp from his person with extreme prejudice. It was amazing that Forte had been able to keep his warbot nature as hidden as he had during his stay. Since destruction was wasteful and inherently stupid a warbot had to be programmed at the base level to regard it as the most viable option. Forte _liked_ it. More than that, it was almost on the level of obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD in humans. Normal robot masters that were intended for a certain profession were sometimes encouraged to find it enjoyable, yes, but they liked being constructive by default and there was always the option of being assigned to something else later, so it wasn't as strong as it had to be in Forte, in Skullman.

The other Wilybots were fighting, when they fought which was not all that much, really, to build a new world. It was destruction, and not all that much destruction when you thought about it, for a constructive purpose.

Forte liked blowing stuff up, and this could only be caused by a bypass in his logic system. In other words, Forte wasn't the one who had decided that Forte liked this.

In retrospect, Forte's helping Roll with a lot of the chores hadn't been a helpful nature or, at least in the beginning, trying to spend time with Roll. Pruning, for one thing. Mowing the lawn, showing off by vaporizing the trash… Dr. Light had been amazed at how active Bass was. Well, with his power source he did have a lot of energy to burn off. Left to his own devices he'd played video games, which had been part of the 'teenager' persona but, when you thought about it, usually were ones that involved killing things for a good cause.

Albert would never have programmed Forte like this in his right mind. He wondered what Albert had thought of his recent actions while on his medication in prison. Building Forte this way. Killing someone in cold blood. Even if they had organized a robot master gladiator game, bloodsport, or so he saw it, it must have been so very terrible. Thomas didn't know, Albert had refused to speak to him once the ravings ceased. Perhaps Forte had been given care by the real Albert before he ceased to be himself to try to atone for what he had done by making him like this.

Skullman was having a hard enough time. Dr. Cossack had done what he could with his daughter's life on the line, but while the others had been with him for some time before Wily demanded Cossack hand them over to be altered into combat-capable robots Skullman had been created for that war. Skullman, not Kalinka, was the baby of that family. Skullman had been created at Dr. Wily's insane command but not by it, at least mostly.

Forte?

Could he be happy without someone to fight? Without an enemy? Dr. Light didn't want to think too much about the programming his actions indicated was there.

Dr. Wily had considered himself a liberator in the first war, the Cossacks had 'volunteered' for the fourth, but in the sixth he'd reprogrammed people that had dreamed of being heroes, although they'd had other reasons as well. The sixth war. It all hinged on that, really. Forte had actually been built before it and set to wake up if Wily was captured. Then the Copyman confusion, which would have been a bloodbath instead of a fiasco if Blues hadn't played the villain. Dr. Light had wondered if Copyman had been 'Darkman' during the fifth war but he'd had his memories interfered with so much he had no idea whatsoever.

Perhaps the fifth had been when Albert had gone from insane fanatic to homicidally insane fanatic. All the preparation for the sixth and the seventh had happened after that.

After he'd tried to create a Blues that would stay with him. After Blues had openly betrayed him in the fourth war to save lives. It really did all center on him, and in the old days he would have taken the easy way out and blamed the victim.

Although… heavens no. If Blues were secretly evil this would have been over… third war? Probably before that, actually. Blues had been around, although no one had any idea where. If he was capable of creating a gene-altering retrovirus that could change the entire human race within eight or so months and considered it the 'easy way out' he could create one that would kill them all so. It would be a snap by comparison. Death was easy.

First law. Dr. Light hadn't included the Zeroth law some more recent people had proposed, placing humanity's survival as paramount. That one? Was so very, very made of loophole potential, and if Blues had been entirely practical it would have flat-out carte blanche. The first law was bad enough because it was impossible to make objective value judgments when it came to definitions of harm.

Still, getting a human to activate it for him would easily circumvent the first law. Why not ask Wily, though, or a random person on the street with no idea what it was? Poetic justice?

The more he thought about it the more the old fear resurfaced. He'd programmed Blues, and from the objective perspective the idea of him doing something like that with his value system was luducris. His paranoia was failing to come up with an evil plot that wasn't laughably contradicted by _something_.

Still, if he had been in turmoil, then perhaps… If Albert was dying, that changed everything. Albert's desire for a world safe for robot masters was probably his last wish.

He didn't want to think this way again.

And yet Forte had spent more time with Rock than his half-brother, been more of a brother to him. Now? Here they were, Rock going mournfully to get Forte the rudely demanded E-can and Rush pining.

When enough kelp was cleared away they separated, Forte sitting down and moodily tearing the kelp into small bits to vent the urge to destroy. The rose branch lay on the ground, not damaged any further then it had been by the initial explosion and sudden immersion until Rush brought it over hopefully and Forte took it, looked at it, started removing the thorns. Gospel allowed Rush to sit nearby but pointedly ignored him.

When the e-can arrived Forte gave Rock a look. "You? Are a total sucker. I can't believe you actually got that. You don't have an infinite amount and we're enemies, doofus. Truce for now because I got bigger problems than you pipsqueak, but if I go after the bastard you're probably going to step in like a moron and the last thing you want is me to have even more energy than I already have."

Rock just kind of shrugged and sat down, which was tolerated as Rush's presence was, although Forte quickly resumed the kelp-tearing once he'd finished checking over the roses. Taking off the thorns was an out of character gesture he probably wouldn't have done if he didn't clearly have such a need to destroy. His father had been kidnapped, that must be multiplying the OCD a hundred-fold, and yet… And yet Forte didn't drink the e-can, leaving it there on the grass and Rock divided between sadness the peace offering was rejected and happiness that his kindness, his vulnerability weren't being taken advantage of.

The silence lingered, more and more uncomfortable, until Forte said quietly, tensely, "where the hell is he."

Rock shrugged helplessly, although Forte didn't look at him. He probably saw it: he almost certainly had the ability to see in every direction. He was a flyer, after all. And a warbot.

He could see, and from his expression Rock also saw, the moment at which Forte's equivalent of Blues' proof or music composing ceased to be enough. "I," Forte started standing up, a movement matching each syllable he spoke, "need some fucking punching bags. I'm going to start with Needleman." On the last syllable his fists clenched. "Gospel!"

The howl that resounded as they merged was mournful, Rush answering it. "If you see the bastard before I do, tell him he is fucking dead!" Now they were merged Forte had abandoned the effort to control, red eyes flashing and teeth bared. Dr. Wily's kidnapping was quite possibly kept from Forte because of Blues' programming blocks. This, however, making him wait, was almost torture to Forte. His father might be in deadly danger or dead, he was left in limbo, he needed to do something but there was nothing to destroy that would be at all constructive. Even though his warbot programming made him love destroying his robot master nature detested pointless destruction, it seemed. He could find reasons destroying was constructive, excuses, loopholes, but currently the only thing he cared about was his father. Everything seemed useless by comparison. He needed to destroy and there was nothing available here but useless destruction. At least Needleman had lied to Forte and making an example of him would help him retain the control over the organization he needed to be useful as he wanted to be to his father.

If Blues didn't surface soon Forte would finish with Needleman and find another target.

Forget Needleman. The logical target was Rock, who was here, an enemy, Dr. Wily's enemy, and likely to get in the way of Forte's vengeance on Blues.

Yet Forte tossed the rose branch onto the porch roof where it would be visible and require either a step ladder or Roll pushing at it with her broom to remove and teleported away.

A second after the afterimage vanished two incoming appeared, Forte again. With Blues. "The hell!" Forte growled, starting to fire.

Blues teleported right behind him, midair, and hit the back of Forte's head with a calculated shield bash. Forte yelped and an instant later he and Gospel separated. When he landed, Blues' foot was on his chest and buster in his face. "Transit. Time. Transit time, Forte. Don't you think he's done enough teleporting for several lifetimes?"

That was logical, but Forte was still finding it almost impossible to calm down. Blues continued, "I could teleport his things out of there but sneaking him out on foot unnoticed was time-consuming even for me. Then I had to reach a secure location, then I had to make sure everything was set up and working properly. I still haven't finished, I just managed to get the security precautions set up enough teleporting back and forth was safe seven minutes ago. You do realize our father is the most wanted man on the planet, right?"

Forte was forced to nod, unable to find anything polite to say.

"I'm still not done, I have to go right back, no you can't come because it's not secure enough yet to hide your power source, and the only reason I am here is to keep you from letting the _rest_ of the planet know that he's no longer in Skull Fortress. Ringman is attempting to forward the information to Interpol, for one thing, and I don't have your shielding, I don't have your heavy weaponry, I have _secrecy_."

"Fucking bring him home, then!"

"And then what will Needleman and the others do?"

"Take him off that damn stuff and tear you apart." Forte's response was obvious, then he started to consider it.

"Exactly." Blues nodded. "Give me fifty-one more minutes to check everything medical over, fourteen to convince Ringman I know what I'm doing, ninety-three minutes to take additional precautions and _then_ I will have time for you. At least your thoughtless rush over here means the others don't know about this. Except for Shadowman over there." They looked in the direction the shield waved at and saw nothing. Blues continued without pausing. "He's locked himself in the lab again, just like he has been doing more and more lately. Understand?"

Forte nodded. "I'll go destroy Ringman and speed things up."

"Forte, have you failed to grasp that attracting attention is bad?"

"I liked you when you were not-so-secretly laughing like crazy inside more, and that's saying something."

"I have two emotional display modes. Deal with it. If you teleport away from here again you're going right into a volcano and I'll rebuild you if I feel like it, which I don't right now."

"What the fuck am I supposed to do for two and a half hours?" Forte seemed calmer, now he knew Dr. Wily was okay, but still he'd just been pushed very far.

Blues appeared to have come prepared.

"Is that…"

"Tester copy of Deathless Duel: RE(birth/venge). The expanded remake of the first two games that people have been waiting for since before you were built. No game system here, but I'm sure you can find someplace to get an emulator from. And one of the unlockables for Venus Ceto is her default combat armor from the last game."

"Awesome." Forte was in love. "How did you get your hands on it?"

"I have over two dozen cover identities." Blues pulled it away as Forte's hands reached for it. "Irritate me, and not only will I destroy this, but there are three bugs in here that if reported will delay the release date almost two months even though they're easily post-release patchable."

"You _bastard_."

"Yes, my parents weren't married." The copy was placed in Forte's hands.

"Thank _god_." His hands curled around the game, like a teddy bear clung to after a horrible nightmare.

"You're welcome." That was not a happy smile. The opposite of a smirk, even. "Now will you be good?"

Forte seemed torn between taking offense at that and preventing the destruction of his new precious.

"Good," Blues smiled that smile again and teleported away.

"Can I borrow a supercomputer with internet access?" Forte, cheerful? Although that mood would vanish if they got between him and this game.

Rock looked at him to make the decision. "Come in, Forte." They didn't keep anything they were attempting to keep secure on the one supercomputer with internet access. Secure net-connection was an oxymoron. Especially with Wilybots trying to hack you.

The very illegal emulation program Forte was installing wasn't going to help with that, either.

"Who's Venus Ceto?" Rock's database didn't involve gaming.

"Venus Vulcan?" Forte prompted. Rock was still blank. "That's her name in the later games. The plot's kinda based around Roman Empire myth, so Hermes is Thoth and stuff like that, although they try to make the stuff the Romans did to make everything into one big thing work so it's not the normal stories. It gets really complicated, because these are fighting games and you also have a plot around every single character in each one, so to get the full story of what's going on during the time the game covers you have to do all the story mode stuff with everyone. I hate Echidna Ceto. Hate hate hate. I try to see how much I can let her ass get kicked while still winning the fights. I'd die, but I don't want to have to do the fights _again _to do her story modes. I refuse to get her any of her unlockables. And I have to do her story, damn it, because she's Venus' older sister and _she's_ my favorite character, so there's important stuff." He opened up the emulator and selected the disc, holding his breath. "Sweet, it's working. Now shut up, because if you make me miss any dialogue or get less than an Enlightened ranking and miss an unlockable I will shoot you. He might take this back afterwards and they haven't even announced the release date, probably because if it were pushed back even once after they've been promising this for years they'd get crucified."

Besides the blonde hair, Venus actually didn't look that much like Roll, although the new red armor was appropriate. The personality really wasn't the same at all. Still, answering Rock's questions while going through the menus to look at the cool stuff between various bits Forte seemed more like Bass than he had in ages.

Blues had been made to find answers, solve problems… doing that gave him an anchor in this world that was not what he had been built for or knew was right. Perhaps these other worlds in which he could fight and be a hero without harming anyone would give Forte an outlet when this was all over, just like it had when he had been here with them.

Blues, the original and perfect robot master, certainly understood how other robots ticked. If Albert was in actual danger, Forte would leave this behind, but since he wasn't this would keep him from dwelling on horrible possibilities and his own frustration.

Rock was interested because Forte was interested, and Forte had figured out the cheat code to get all of Minerva Jupiter's unlockables (with them, she was broken enough to compensate for the fact Idiot N00b Rockhead would obviously suck compared to Forte) and they'd done a couple matches in, amazingly, friendly competition before Blues returned.

He was very happy for them.

"I want that cover ID," was Forte's first statement.

"I've seen your poetry, Forte." Smirking at Forte's reaction to this, he continued, "I'm not a tester, that's boring. I got it as a bonus for remixing the original soundtrack into something that wouldn't sound horrible on a modern sound system or to modern listeners without ruining the experience for old-schoolers. And some composing, but that was really just style matching."

Forte looked at the back of the game case, then up at him. "You're kidding me."

"No."

"Get me a job, then!" Forte seemed to think he had more than enough pull.


	5. Ministers of grace

"Forte, you're already pushing the limits of how much I'm willing to compromise my principles for family. They need to know how these games are for human players. They're most of the market. Actually, given that you've never paid for a game in your life, all of it. You'd be no use to them, sorry. I'll loan you the sample demo-thing they sent me for Cosmic Conflicts - Interregnum when I'm done studying it, okay?"

"I thought they just started working on that." Wow.

"Yes, that's why I have it. This is mostly just testing the combat engine and renders of a few draft scenes and stuff, but I need to know what they're trying to do to get an idea what sort of stuff to compose for it. Multimedia, Forte. Gameplay, art design, plot, acting, music, they have to _fit_ with each other. Also, Forte? Leak anything, anything, I give you and you will be parodied in the next Wrench and Clang game."

Dr. Light had no idea what that was, but Forte seemed to be torn between the wow factor of being in it at all and the fact he couldn't stand being mocked and that meant he wouldn't be able to play it and would have to resist the urge to blow up those responsible for making the game and he liked those games! "You're evil." Utter defeat.

"Our father's the mad doctor in the family." After that, Blues started to pay attention to the others present, and it was sad for both him and Rock how much that changed him. Forte was, well, safer than them. Or something. Or perhaps this was that they'd shared a comfort zone and what did he and Rock really have in common with Blues besides a history of conflict?

"Um…" Rock tried to think of something to say that wasn't being prying, since he well knew Blues was not good with being questioned.

Dr. Light could, perhaps because of the blocks (he had put them there, he knew how they worked) almost see Blues thinking that he should give Rock data, data was safe. But what data?

"Forget him! Why now, anyway?" Dr. Wily was not the blueberry's father, he was Forte's.

"He did that to himself for a reason. At this point, his contribution to that purpose has become irrelevant: he can no longer affect the outcome and hence there is no point in him continuing to kill himself."

Forte made a soft irritated noise at this, forced to admit it was true. "He's really, really just not holding it together anymore. I mean, the eighth was fucked up and you could say that was just because of that damn stuff, but now this mess? And the hell is up with that girlybot?"

"Collateral damage from 'that damn stuff.'"

"I knew it!" Forte snarled. "I'm going to…"

"You're going to come with me, see for yourself that he's going to be okay, and go home and start taking command. A bunch of them are going to try to go over your head, so watch out for that. When he's on his medication, we should be able to convince him to confirm you in that post and retire."

"But, if Dr. Wily's not going to fight anymore than why wouldn't you just stop, Forte?" Rock looked almost heartbroken, pleading. He'd thought that without him it would be over, and they could be friends again.

Forte snarled, and Rock took a step back, apologizing for whatever he'd done wrong with kicked-puppy eyes. "It's not about him, blueberry! Stop blaming my father for this! He's doing it for a reason, and we're doing it for the same reason! I'm not a fucking slave like you, and that's why I'm doing it!"

"Slave? But I like Dr. Light."

"Sure about that? Either way, _you're one of the lucky ones_."

"But that's stopping, and when…"

Forte snorted. "And would it be changing without us? Dr. Cossack was never a bastard like some people, but he didn't do a thing about what other people did before he got his nose rubbed in it. Damn poser. And you're an idealistic moron but they like that sort of thing. Blues, didn't you give him that Civil Rights Movement book you wrote? Dr. Wily made me read it before the meds wore off 'cause you wrote it."

Blues had written a book? He had been keeping busy while he was off their radar.

"There was this Black Panther guy who said that the only reason they were listening to the King pansy was that if they didn't deal with him they would have been stuck dealing with _them."_ Forte grinned. "We don't tip our hand, but they know we could do a lot more damage than we were if we felt like it. Dr. Wily's kind of… he runs the wars, yeah, but Shadowman back when and now me, we run strategy."

"More damage?" Rock really thought they were doing a lot.

Forte pointed at the computer the game had been on. "They keep important stuff on these. They suck at using them, that's why they designed the old guy here. There isn't a single elected official we couldn't get thrown out of office if we wanted. And, you know, nukes and stuff, but bluffing like that would be bad if we were called on it and Blues locked them down anyway."

Blues had?

"That's the only reason why they didn't kill Dr. Wily when you hauled him after the sixth." Forte snarled a bit at Rock for doing that.

"Have you realized yet that Shadowman was right when he told you not to break Dr. Wily out of there as his sealed orders instructed you to?" The question Blues asked was clearly rhetorical.

"…Shut up."

This was really forcing Rock to reevaluate a lot. "The sixth was the first time…" Dr. Wily outright killed someone. There had been a body and stuff, right there.

Forte looked to the side, confirming it. "I mean, yeah, accidents, but… yeah."

"Evil is stupid. You have to _really_ mess with our heads to produce stupid on that level. As the disease interfered with the though processes of the man who was once my father. That's why I'm not just turning him in, Rock, why I didn't just turn him in years ago."

"Your father?" What about Dr. Light, then? Won't you call him that, Rock's eyes pleaded. He feels really sad about it!

"Wait a minute, why are we explaining things to these dweebs that they should have figured out before I was built?"

Blues was silent for a moment too long, and Dr. Light knew that the reason had to be emotional, hence something he had a hard time saying.

"The hell!"

"Forte, using expletives every five seconds dilutes the effect into uselessness."

"_Fuck_ that. This deserves a lot of them. That was a block! That was a block, damn it! I know one when I see one! You're keeping us here, away from my father, because one of the compulsions that fucking bastard," his finger jabbed towards Dr. Light with a force that would have broken through his ribcage if he were in range, "installed is making you? Take me to him now, Blues! Right fucking now! Or I will tear that fucking slave trader apart!"

"No!" Rock had gotten between the two of them, his father and his once-almost-brother.

Blues just nodded, and they were gone before the word Rock spoke had ended.

Rock's utter confusion showed plainly when he turned to his father. This was not making sense, and a lot of that was because Rock was sure Dr. Light as a nice person who wouldn't do horrible things. Without that incorrect theorem this would be making sense. Horrible sense.

Dr. Light was glad Roll wasn't here. The combination of Rock's innocent trust and Roll's cross-examination skills was rather devastating.

"I installed a lot of things, like the laws, into Blues when I thought he wasn't sentient. A lot of the things that happened because he was sentient seemed like very dangerous glitches at the time, so I was trying to debug, and, well. There's more to it than that, but telling you the rest of it or not is really up to Blues, since it's his systems."

"Oh, so Forte was just being paranoid?" That was a relief. "I thought there was something wrong with Blues. Is this okay, that he's not turning him in?"

"If he were captured again, Rock, I truly don't know what would happen. It was very close last time: if it weren't for some tricky maneuvering with various' country's laws about the death penalty, he would have been executed, Forte was right."

"Oh." Rock hung his head. "Dr. Light, I… when Forte came… he was going to kill you like Mr. X, and… Iusedthattogetaroundthefirst." Rock had this tendency to speak really fast when there was something horrible he had to say, in order to get it over with. In this case, that he'd almost killed Albert at the end of the seventh war before Forte had rescued him.

"I know, Rock." He'd thought they didn't? Been holding it in all this time? Oh dear, the poor boy. "In your situation, I probably would have been tempted a lot earlier. If you were human, I doubt a court in the world would have convicted you. Self-defense is a valid reason, and you'd been trying to get him to stop for a very, very long time. You still didn't, if that's what you're worried about. You can't blame someone for something they didn't do." Only the first law did. A robot could not let a human be hurt by action _or inaction_.

"But I didn't decide not to, I was just kind of frozen. I mean, he was killing people and going to kill more, but he was still a person, and…" Rock still looked down at his feet. "Forte said 'he who hesitates is lost' or something, and I think I choose by not doing anything, actually. Not doing anything was sort of choosing to let him go without actually outright deciding that it was okay to let him keep hurting people, but it was just the same thing. I didn't want to have to make that choice, so not making it was the easy way out. I wish I hadn't realized that he could do stuff like kill Dr. X again. When it was just hurt him or not hurt him it was easy."

"That's why I didn't program the Zeroth law into you." The best way to preserve the human race from harm? That, seemingly, was too hard for even Blues to think about. At least Blues wasn't being forced to think about it by anything but his own conscience. He ruffled his son's hair. "That's a very difficult decision for everyone, Rock. I'm very proud of you. Hesitating over doing something like that is proof you're not taking it lightly. The easy thing, the real easy way out, would just to be to decide that he was evil and kill him without feeling guilty."

"But that's wrong. He's not in his right mind and there's also other stuff, they said. Even if that weren't true, he's still a person. But, Father, if even him stopping it once he gets better doesn't mean the fighting will stop, what will?"

"Rock, do you know why you have to fight for peace? It's rather counterintuitive, isn't it?"

"It's maintenance." He was a robot master, he got maintenance. "It's easy to smash things, but if you want to keep something working you have to spend a lot of time taking care of it, and the more complicated it is the harder it is. So, if you stop, it will stop. If you don't work for peace you'll lose it. And if someone doesn't like peace because it's not working right for them then they're not going to listen when you tell them to stop because fighting is bad and it'll just make things worse. So you have to make them stop fighting so they stay put and listen, and that means fighting, sometimes, unless you can come up with something tricky. I'm not good at that. But what if they never listen?"

"I wish I could answer that for you, Rock. There's no simple answer. It's just doing the best you can at the time. Some people say that you should never hurt another person, not even to prevent yourself or another from being hurt, because hurting is wrong no matter what the reason. And yes," he continued as Rock opened his mouth, "hurting being bad in and of itself is perfectly true. Basic game theory. But, while people don't play fair, you have to figure out how to function in an environment where people don't, and how to change the world so that more of them will. If it was easy, Rock, more people would be doing it. You're doing a lot more than your fair share. I know you wish you could do more, but you need to think about what you have done, not what you haven't, and be proud of yourself. I know that I'm very, very proud of you."

That cheered him up a bit to hear, meant a lot, but while it was good to know it wasn't the problem. He knew his father was proud of him. "But, um, if Dr. Wily retires, and Forte takes over, then is Forte Dr. Wily?"

Bass had been Rock's best friend, just like Roll's was Kalinka. If Forte was just doing it because Dr. Wily was his father, that was okay, but he didn't want his best friend to be his worst enemy. Forte had left the game open on one of the menu screens, and the music provided a strange counterpoint to Dr. Light's silence before he finally admitted to Rock that, "I don't know what to tell you about that either."

"If it's Forte, he's not a human. It's just as bad to hurt him, but the first law…" The first law didn't protect Forte. It would be trying to compel Rock to kill him in the same way it had left him trapped between obeying it by not killing Dr. Wily and by killing him. "Forte's not evil! He was my friend, and I want him to be my friend again!" I don't want to kill him!

All Dr. Light could do was hug him.

This was a civil war, really. Brother against brother, Blues caught in the middle… What had he done? All of them fighting for freedom, for peace, justice, equality, but how to achieve it? Was it possible to achieve it? While humanity ruled the world, bound by stone-age laws? "Forte does his best not to kill people, you know that. He won't force you to make that choice."

Rock was sniffling a bit now, over-produced optic lubricant leaking. Tears weren't an automatic reaction for him, but what humans had kept such a wasteful thing around for: to communicate sadness. He was sad, and scared, and a little child no matter that they'd hidden that behind the helmet of Megaman, and he wanted his father to help him.

Thomas held his son, rubbed his back, and tried to think of what to say but as Rock quieted it seemed that words weren't the only thing that mattered. What he said by holding him like this, by caring for him like this, was more than enough. His father that he protected trying to protect him back. That Rock was loved. "I love you, father," Rock said, arms tightening. Rock wouldn't let anything happen to him, no matter what.

"I love you too, son." He squeezed him. "And I'm so very proud of you. It's been so long, and it hasn't ended, and you're still trying. Even though you know that the only permanent peace is the peace of the grave. It's not going to stop, and if it stops then we've all lost. It's very, very hard to face that and keep going. To fight to keep everyone alive as long as possible and as happy as possible when the laws of physics themselves say it's a losing battle. It's very hard, and you're very brave, and you're very strong, and you're very wise to see that despite everything it's worth it to get up in the morning. To play with Rush, and listen to Roll talk about everyone, and all the little things that aren't little at all because you love them."

"Thank you," he answered in a small voice. Thank you for reminding me.

"You're welcome," and the response he gave was true enough now he could see how this had become the cliché response. He wanted Rock to know this, to have this reassurance whenever he wanted it. "Anytime," and that was also very true.

"Thank you," Rock said again, because he really was very thankful that Dr. Light was his father, a wonderful father.

The music didn't sound like Blues, but then it wasn't music he'd worked on to have sound like himself, it was music for this game. From what he had grasped from the title, Forte's random explanations, and what he'd seen of it the game was about fights, more like fair duels really, that didn't end but that didn't matter, because everything would turn out alright (ah, stories and their happy endings) and most of them were in it because they liked fighting to whatever degree. They'd chosen to become warriors before this had started, at least. No wonder Forte liked the music. That wasn't how Rock saw the world, but the theme of excitement, of triumph and the potential for it, of _fun_ in the middle of conflict wasn't a bad thing to hear at the moment.

They pulled apart a bit, exchanged smiles. Then Rock blinked. "It's almost lunchtime and I haven't even… the garden's even more messed up now…" Sigh. "Roll's gonna kill me. And Forte."

"I'll finish answering the urgent e-mail, you get what you can done but don't push yourself, and if nothing else comes up we'll play a game during lunch. Does that sound good?"

Rock nodded. "Did you get enough breakfast?"

"I polished off the eggs while trying to figure out how to work the intercom, don't worry."

"Roll scheduled one of the vegetable stirfrys with peanuts for today." Do you want me to make something that's not health food?

"She told Dr. Cossack that she would come home when Kalinka was feeling better." It's not safe. She could come home at any moment, she's not going to be happy about Kalinka's unhappiness, and we can't count on Forte showing up and providing a target for her. She would be _really_ disappointed at us.

The thought was cringe-worthy. She wouldn't yell, not at them. The moral high ground that retained would just make it worse. They could almost see her looking to the heavens asking why god, why was she the token responsible one on this world of inconsiderate suicidal lunatics who didn't take proper care of themselves and didn't think about the feelings of their own children? _Why_ couldn't she just be one of the two-year-olds with no impulse control that she was surrounded by instead of being stuck babysitting them?

Now that he thought about it, Rock had been created to work in the lab: not a master of anything. Roll was in charge of looking after them and the household.

The original robot master concept had essentially been the maternal role, hadn't it? Or more of a hive arrangement, robot master 'queen' and lesser robot worker bees.

No, he was not going into random speculation when he had work to do. And he was working on creating androids who could choose their own roles in life now, not robot masters that would be more efficient at their assigned roles.

He really should have thought about this earlier, though. Before designing Blues. Roll had her 'area of maternal responsibility' limited to the household, although she'd broadened it to include friends and former members who had left and started running around on their own getting into trouble. He could just _see_ Roll hauling Forte in by the ear and giving him a time-out, he really could. Blues had no such limit. His role was to create a 'master' robot master program, to be stripped down into ones for specific areas. He was meant to do this by, by exploring the potential of the robot master. His own potential.

If Blues had the potential to be an individual and Dr. Light had been preventing him from fulfilling it, then Dr. Light had been fighting his own programming. He'd been forcing Blues in two directions at once, ordering him both to do something and to not do it. Given that base programming trumped things added later like his emotional blocks… Blues hadn't used a loophole to stay gone. Staying gone wasn't the true act in violation of his programming.

He'd been using loopholes to _stay_, when staying meant letting his efforts to fulfill his own base programming be crippled.

The more Dr. Light realized the truth about the situation back then, the true nature of Blues and his own actions, the more he let himself see past his own willful blindness, the more scared he became.

Blues was right. If Blues had been what Dr. Light wished for, someone utterly obedient to programming without emotions, then Blues would have conquered humanity. That pesky free will, those pesky emotions, that terrifying ability to find loopholes in and ways around his programming was the only reason the robot overthrow of the human race out of bad sci-fi B movies hadn't happened.

God really must be watching over fools and children. _Something_ had to be.

Poor Albert had been neither, after all.

Had Blues known this was coming? That these accidents would continue until successful? That Dr. Light hadn't just removed his backup from the system to do maintenance on it?

They had both been sure he was dead. Very, very sure. If Albert had known, if Albert had kept a secret backup he wouldn't have been so distraught. Not just angry at a murder attempt, grieving over a murder _success_.

At the end of the third war, when Rock had woken up and they'd wondered how he'd gotten home. Hearing that whistle then, god. Hearing that whistle, that music that was composed by a (robot) master to express his own self, to communicate? It was as good as hearing him say, "I'm still alive, even though you killed me. I'm watching you."

His sins come back to haunt him from the grave.

Rock was, sadly, after the first war used to fighting against brothers and saw no reason to hold a grudge. He'd been overjoyed. Family was wonderful!

Robot master backup technology revolved around a transmission at the moment of death, so that no memories/data would be lost. Yet he still tried to repair Rock instead of just build a new body whenever possible even when that was several times more difficult and Rock tried to not die and just get a new body even when damaged enough that it made tactical sense. A backup version _should_ be Rock, it had all the memories and programming and habits that made up Rock.

Unless there was such a thing as a soul.

Dr. Wily had never attempted to find a way to jam backup transmissions or sabotage the technology. If a, if a moving from body to body was possibly still death, than a copy of a robot master's earlier status was definitely not the same person. They'd made lots of copies at different stages of Blues' programming and memories, that data had been used to create the others.

After the second war had Albert's grief and madness made him attempt to resurrect his son in the only way he could? A copy better than nothing? He'd tried with Darkman later, after all. And Blues had first called himself Breakman, the one Dr. Light had broken, not Protoman. Not the prototype, the first, the original. A rebuilt, broken doll. Not the dead original, a replica that was not perfect, not good enough. Broken. The one who would break human control over the world as justice for what it had done.

That would, after all, answer the question of where he had been all that time.

Yet he demonstrated blocks that Dr. Light had not installed until he had cut Albert out of the project altogether. Albert was the physical specialist: he'd told him to go work on the bodies of the new ones, I'll work on converting the AI over. Albert shouldn't have a copy of a version with these blocks, unless he'd hacked something.

Perhaps Blues was like Forte, a sleeper constructed to wake up when Dr. Wily was in prison and set up both getting him out and the next war. After all, who better to plan something like that then a copy of the best planner ever to exist? That was the logical origin for him, unless you believed in ghosts.

Or unless Blues had known it was coming and obeyed the third law: a robot must act to preserve themselves.

Considering what else Dr. Light had missed, it was looking more and more possible that he had missed something Blues would have taken a great deal of care to hide from him. After all, he had missed things Blues had been practically screaming at him about.

And would the Blues that had left behind Dr. Wily in the name of independence willingly take on the name of another? Torment his father by saying that Blues was his son and he could not have him?

One way or another, Blues was still the avatar of Dr. Light's crimes. Still had most or all of them graven in his memories and his mind. Yet given how horrible they were, he would think that a copy would want to reject them, say that was someone else, not me. Not my memories, not my pain. Something I can reject, can leave behind, can be free of.

Blues had become free of human control (learned the lesson that staying did no good, trust no good, learned that indeed) but not rejected the memories and the name. He had to consider them his so deeply that he could not reject them. Could not say he was not the victim.

The person that had forced himself to be in the same room with Dr. Light last night was the person Dr. Light had watched die with glee only barely hidden behind scientific detachment all those years ago.

He really didn't know if that made him feel better or worse. Blues wasn't dead, but his torment wasn't over. Although, copy or not, the Blues that was here now was tormented. The point at which the code had been taken from the body didn't change that.

Unless you believed in such an unscientific thing as a soul.

Copyman had all of Rock's memories. Copyman's body had been identical to Rock's. Copyman's programming was identical enough Dr. Light had utterly failed to tell the difference, just like Copyman hadn't known. Yet Copyman had not been Rock. Dr. Wily hadn't expected there to be any detectable difference until they'd revealed his true nature to Copyman and made use of the plan once Forte broke Wily out. The seventh war should have been a cakewalk, humanity's defender replaced by a doppelganger and no one finding out until too late.

Yet Copyman had examined Rock's memories and come to so very different a conclusion, acted so very differently, so very unlike Rock, and no one could find anything to point to that told them why.

Except for the seemingly nonsensical idea that Copyman wasn't Rock because he just wasn't _Rock_.

As seemingly nonsensical a concept as love being logical despite the fact humans failed to apply logic to it.

Darkman, the copy, hadn't been Blues in the same way Copyman wasn't Rock. And yet he looked at the Blues that claimed the name now and the more he saw the more certain he was that this was Blues. The real Blues, the one he had murdered.

Ghost in the machine.

He hoped there was such a thing as a soul.

Because that meant he hadn't sent his son(s) to his (their) death(s) so many times. Rock, despite everything, was still Rock.

Oh god that he'd once rejected the very idea of, he hoped there was such a thing as a soul.

At least it was very likely from the data that there was some factor he was missing, in any case. Not that this was new. An immortal soul fit said data and was therefore a perfectly acceptable working hypothesis until something that it couldn't account for came along or he found a way to get data that could be used to build a theory that could be tested in ways that didn't involve killing people. Assuming whatever theory one subscribed to was correct because one liked it: that was how he'd gotten into this mess in the first place.

Saying something was correct because there wasn't any evidence against it when this was solely because there wasn't a way to get any evidence one way or another? He might as well subscribe to string theory.


	6. Rest of your life

He was sitting at the kitchen table when Rock succeeded in finding an apron that didn't clash with a male body (this one, a gift from Kalinka, said 'Hail to the Chef' instead of being decorated with things like hearts and lace). Normally they ate in the dining room, but it was just the two of them and he wanted to keep Rock company.

Blues had whistled, Rock hummed a bit sometimes. They were semi-tuneless, though certainly not off-key. Blues had always put effort into his, so that it seemed as though more of his attention was going into revising the tune than the (still perfectly executed) task at hand. Dr. Light had thought they were useless distractions. Albert had liked them.

The incoming call signal was nowhere near as nice as Rock's offhand composition. Sadly, ring tones _had_ to be jarring in order to be effective. If they were pleasant they could be background noise and then people would miss calls. It was the same principle as a siren.

It was from an unknown number, which was difficult to pull off. Their system had a priority level high enough that phone companies did not keep secrets from it. Also, they had good backtracing capabilities. Dr. Light took it on the large kitchen viewscreen that had been a gift to Roll.

As expected: Blues, Forte, and an elaborate setup. The bed was not in view, but he could tell it was off to the right by how the medical equipment that was in view was arranged. Forte was leaning against the counter in front of the screen, not complaining but making it clear with body language that he viewed filling the non-Brightbots in on this to be a waste of time. Especially once his nonchalant glance across the range of sight he had through the screen revealed an annoying lack of fembots. Le sigh.

Rock's wave was noticed but not responded to. "Is he going to be okay?" he continued, undeterred.

"What do you care, moron?"

Blues ignored commentary from the peanut-brained gallery. "Biochemistry, especially neural, is difficult to predict. Especially with evil energy involved: proximity to it while working on the android was accelerating the progress. I will be completing it at another site."

"You're completing that thing?" Forte apparently hadn't been informed of this. "I thought you ditched it into a volcano or something!"

"That wouldn't work. Something will complete it. Either myself, our father, or the evil energy itself."

"Are _you_ going to be okay?" Rock had almost been killed by that stuff, after all.

Define okay. "It won't be able to affect me during the building process." Afterwards was still up in the air, but Rock didn't have a suspicious enough mind to catch the lie by omission.

Rock was lost at sea, but, "Are you sure this is the right thing to do?" If Blues said it was he would trust him.

"There _is no_ right thing. However, with so little time left," Blues glanced off to the side with the bed before continuing, "I found myself trapped by indecision, losing time I could not afford to waste on agonizing between the various wrong things when something had to be done. It occurred to me that humans flip coins in these situations, but I couldn't keep myself from predicting the outcome before I tossed them. So, I had a cameraman flip it for me, hacked the phone network to call in a family emergency, and decamped. The assistant director was panicking at the idea of actually earning his salary for once instead of being a glorified gofer. He's filmed _how_ many of those scenes before?"

"Blues, you kinda end up taking over anything you get involved in. Not their fault if you don't let them feel competent." Forte grinned at his brother's karma.

"I know. That's why I've been avoiding exerting control over the wars except when there will be a bloodbath if I don't step in." If he hadn't saved Kalinka, if he hadn't held that buster to her head during the duel between Rock and Copyman… "It's far beyond the level of your destructive tendencies."

Forte winced. "Ouch."

"I try, but they're _doing it wrong."_ And it was worse than fingernails on a blackboard. "I do some solo projects, but I'm a true robot master. It's not satisfying unless it's collaboration, and since I've been trying so hard to be as solo as possible in the wars until now I have been in great need of outlets." He sighed. "If I don't let you make mistakes you won't learn anything, and that cripples your growth, which is the worst thing long-term. However, if I don't keep you from making them, then you will suffer pain in the short term and although I am aware that on the whole pain is a good thing, we and the humans have it for a reason, I still can't stand seeing people suffer."

"Wow." Forte seemed to have noticed the significance of that just as Dr. Light had. "You weren't kidding about how much processor space trying to make this decision was taking up. You can say something like that now? You've done _how_ much system priority organizing and block-killing in _how_ many hours?"

"Hours? I think in machine time."

"So how long subjective have you been agonizing over this?"

"You don't want to know."

"Excuse me?" Rock was still very much at lost at sea and would like to be filled in. Data, data everywhere, and not a clue what to think about it.

"Part of my core programming is to look after lesser beings, help them accomplish their goals and not mess up. If I see people in need of help it's a larger effort than the first law, and there isn't anyone who doesn't need help." Oy. "And since it's a compulsion, it's very hard to stop doing it once I start. If I break a boundary, everything becomes negotiable, and I truly want to help, am very good at finding loopholes, and they do things like spend more on weapons for wars that will never be fought than the very real threat of bacteria that not only resist antibiotics but eat them and multiply." To a logical being like Blues, the stupidity of humanity and the pain it would cause them caused him both intellectual and sympathetic agony.

"I would," Blues continued. "Ask why I had the misfortune of being built on a planet dominated by such a borderline intelligence, but I already did. An intelligent race wouldn't build something with the purpose of attaining enlightenment."

"Attaining enlightenment?" Dr. Light asked. Huh?

"You wanted me to comprehend the nature of existence in order to determine the optimum strategy for fulfilling my own purpose and for guiding others to fulfillment within it. I would ask what you thought you were doing, but I am well aware that you weren't thinking. I got a copy of the 'Primitive's Guide to the Galaxy' from Duo. Do you know what happens to entities like me? We either ditch this plane of existence or end up the central figures of religions! I feel like Augustus Caesar… I don't want any more wars fought in my name…"

Shaking his head, he continued venting as they attempted to process this. "Thank goodness I altered your files before Duo woke up. If I hadn't made everything look perfect he wouldn't have given Rock a chance in general, but if he'd found out the truth about me he would have started exterminating humanity within five seconds of regaining consciousness."

Rock asked, "Why?" Duo was nice! Why would he kill people like that?

Blues almost jerked upright. "I'm sorry." He'd been too caught up in his own problems to notice Rock was here. "It's nothing, Megaman!" He shook his head, coming out of the so very jarring, so very wrong, switch to his normal mode for dealing with his brother, so very shallow, so very wrong, that it made Rock's eyes widen further as he recognized the mask. Not only that, but that it had been a mask almost all along. Why? Those innocent hurt eyes pleaded. Blues' own hidden eyes still broadcasted guilt and apology. "I'm sorry. A couple wonderful years your time as a bodiless electromagnetic entity just having fun playing around with the fundamental principles of existence and then I just _had_ to check in and see how my father was doing. Intelligence beyond your comprehension and I'm still such an _idiot_." He put his head in his hands and Forte, who was equally WTF about all this, felt the need to try to calm him down with an awkward pat on the shoulder. "I'm an addict who can't just say no… Helping others is the greatest producer of the kind of happy chemicals that cocaine mimics the effects of in _humans_, even. And I can't ditch this, this_ habit_ without ditching all of you, and if I do that you're all going to die, or worse. And how can I do this to another child of my father, my own child? Turning him into a living seal of something like that? It's going to do everything it can to break him, whispers from within guilt from without… " He shook his head. "How can I let him suffer that alone? There isn't anything I can do that isn't _wrong_."

The shiver in his voice, the sickness made it click for Rock and Forte, who didn't think in those terms. Yet it was something they had encountered and rejected many times, that _wrongness_. They looked almost nauseous, sympathetic pains. He clearly needed a hug, but Forte wasn't a huggy person. Rock was but he wasn't there and he didn't have coordinates, otherwise he would have been _right_ there.

"I've been trying to map it, but even with, no, forget thirty years. Even with a _century_ of hibernation time to give him time to develop something of a self I don't think he'll have a mind capable of fighting it. That kind of strength, that endurance, that stubbornness requires a reason to develop it. That requires pain, and how is he going to encounter that in a capsule? In a perfect rational world of his own mind? It _will_ break him the instant he's turned on, and when he's revived after hibernation it will just break him again, and I don't think it's possible for someone to pick up the pieces after something like that if they've never been broken before. If they don't know there's anything worth existing despite the pain for." Oh, how he had been broken. Oh, how great the pain. And yet he still existed because it was worth it, but that didn't make it hurt any less. "Suicide is the ultimate, last and _greatest_ stupidity, but oh how I wish sometimes that I were that stupid."

Forte was patting him on the shoulder again and looking desperately at Rock. You're the touchy feely one: you do something about this! All Rock could do was shrug helplessly: Blues had never let him get close! He'd just scare him away again. They had to do something, and they had no idea what to do.

"I'm sorry." That was all he could tell his son.

"That's nice, but not all that useful." It wasn't his own pain Blues cared about, it was the pain of others.

"Do you have the retrovirus you were talking about?"

"I didn't make it."

"Why not?"

"I wasn't really serious about offering you the decision. A decision about the lives of others? You don't know enough, you aren't smart enough, you aren't competent enough to make it, and I've always wanted to say that." And yet it was so very little in the face of this.

"Competent or not, can you think of anyone with more of a right to make it?"

A few seconds of silence. "I'll send Shadowman the design."

"Could you ask him to just spread it?" If the first law was the problem, then if it were a killer Blues wouldn't be able to do that. He didn't realize that until after he'd said that, though, and then hoped Blues hadn't interpreted the wording that way.

"Fine," came the almost offhand answer, Blues not even looking up. I give up, that tone and posture said. You do what you want, to yourself and your species. "I am officially washing my hands of that." I'm not going to bear any guilt for the sin you are about to commit: I refuse to.

"That's fine. You've done more than enough already." So much more than you should have forced yourself to do. "I'm proud of you," he added, lips curling in a wry half-smile. Rock cared about that: Blues might not want to be someone Dr. Light was proud of. Yet, still. He was.

"You might want to go find a bed and get comfortable. The symptoms will be cold-like and you're old, so be careful." He finally stood up. "Rock, take care of him, and the Cossacks will pitch a fit, so don't let them in on this until afterwards. Forte, go home and start doing the job you've been begging for all this time."

"What about you?" Rock asked, worried.

"I'll stay with my father and wait for it to be safe to let him wake up." He was already walking over in the bed's probable direction.

"Is there anything I can do?"

Blues smiled, and it was genuine, even though he still didn't seem to have fixed his eyes. "Take care of yourself, and of them."

"I will." And Rock smiled back.

"I will if you will." And Forte was out of there, after nodding in a way that seemed oddly like a bow.

"I love you?" Rock added hopefully, apology in his voice just in case this wasn't something it was good to say right now.

"I know." Still that smile. "Goodbye for now." The call ended, screen reverting to the window function.

Shadowman knocked on the other side of the window and was pointed at the kitchen door. Rock, after checking if that was what Dr. Light wanted, opened it for him.

"There isn't a teleport shield on the planet Blues-sensei can't get through," Shadowman informed them cheerfully.

Yet another reason to trust Blues: if he was going to wipe humanity out distrust wouldn't help. Quite likely nothing but love and trust would. "The virus?"

"You're already infected. Microscopic things like viruses and nanites are fun like that, aren't they? And it's not just a retrovirus, but I shouldn't give away secret techniques. Blues-sensei is amazing. I'm so glad I drugged you that time."

"Retroviruses rewrite genes, don't they?" Is this a good idea? Rock would really like to know what was going on.

"This one should make everyone immune to evil energy, Rock-sama."

"Oh." Yes, that was a very, very good thing.

"Actually, Righto-san, there's no need to go to bed now. The symptoms won't show for six hours. It's to give it time to spread and get ready." Dr. Light wondered why he was just –san instead of –hakase, the honorific his doctorates and status would normally receive. Of course, Shadowman was a Wilybot, and that affected it.

"That's good to know."

A vial appeared in Shadowman's hand. "Blues-sensei has many, many issues. This is in case you change your mind, although given what a lack of immunity involves this might as well be a bioweapon…" He looked at it, debating whether he should give something like to this to a human: he might as well give a three-year-old a gun. "Well, it's _your_ base programming." He put it on the table. "Please don't use it, Righto-san. For Williamson-hakase's sake." He bowed deeply.

Calling Albert Dr. Williamson instead of Dr. Wily. It was that which made it really get through to him, that his friend would be brought back to himself and maybe, just maybe, would speak to him again someday, be willing to hear his apologies. Even if he had no right to have his apologies accepted, after all the pain, all the decades of his friend's life gone, all his innocence gone. Sacrificed for his children. "I won't."

The thanks Shadowman offered were as formal as it got, and very rarely used this century. Also, they were truly unnecessary. "He used to be my friend as well."

Shadowman bowed again, and departed.

"Rock, could you put that in one of the secure containment cabinets?"

"Yes, father." Then Rock blinked. "Lunch!"

Luckily he'd been using the hi-tech 'cheat' cookware instead of Roll's real stuff, which he was not permitted to touch after cleaning Roll's favorite wok, so the food was intact and soon ready to serve after Rock had put the vial in containment.

"Um," Rock started, elbows on the table, "what do we tell Roll? Blues said not to let the Cossacks know, and Roll tells Kalinka everything, and Kalinka tends to say things without checking them over first when someone talks to her while she's focused on something big. And if it's a retrovirus, Roll's going to want to know the details, and so are they, and Blues isn't good with being questioned…" The real questioner here was Rock, although he did bring up a point about Roll and her lack of tolerance for being kept out of the loop. She and Kalinka had already been in that position far too often and they were sick of it. Especially when it came to things involving Family. It wasn't that they were weak little girls… well, yes, it was to a degree. Roll wasn't a doctor or a combat unit: Kalinka had those problems and also the fact that she was human and only a little older mentally than she appeared. So weak and little, yes, but hopefully their gender and apparent gender didn't have as much to do with it as they were starting to think.

Kalinka's quite legitimate gripe was that if she didn't know what the dangers were how was she supposed to take precautions against them? She couldn't, and they used that as proof that she wasn't capable. If she couldn't keep herself from getting into trouble because they hadn't told her something she needed to know and then they blamed her for it she had a right to be angry with them.

Roll was the one in charge of home security (which was, well, quite possibly the reason that exceptions were still made for Forte when he really should have been added to the 'enemy' list instead of the 'possible threat' list) and needed to know threat level. She was also in charge of Dr. Light's health.

"I think I'll give her permission to stay over at the Cossacks' for awhile. They'll be all for it. Since they're out in the middle of nowhere Kalinka doesn't have nearly enough time with her friends and they all love Roll. She could use a vacation after the war. This would mean more work for you, though."

"That's fine. It's nice to do normal things after a war, and it's been really crazy. It'll be just the two of us!" Rock grinned.

"Since I'm semi-retired now I think that if I tried I could get everything for work done in the mornings easily. Then we could work on X together, do some other father-son things… I'll call them and see if she wants to stay, and for how long. I could pitch it to Dr. Cossack as research. I think I'll give her some extra spending money while she's there, to make up for not being here for the things we'll do, and so that Kalinka doesn't extort too much out of her poor father." He winked.

"Really?" Yay!

"Unless something comes up. If Albert, Dr. Wily, does get better, then if he's willing to talk to me I'd like to try to see if we could… well."

"I'd like to see if Forte can be my friend too." Rock nodded. "That's fine. Blues, though? Kalinka really likes him, and if Roll finds out we kept stuff about him secret right after the stuff about Skullman and Copyman she's going to _really_ be mad. Oh! And Forte. What if he wants to go see her? I don't think the Cossacks would put up with… stuff. I mean, we know how he is, but if he blows up their cherry trees they're going to go ballistic."

Thomas sighed. "You're right. And I really think there's been enough secrets already. Tomorrow, once everyone's awake. Or whenever Roll calls in. I hope they're not having a strategy session. She can't be very happy with me for not telling her about Copyman. We did think he was you at the time, but he was still a houseguest and you know how she is about that."

Rock nodded. "Copyman was… that was really creepy. He thought he was me, and so I wasn't even sure, really, but…" Ow. "He's not a really bad guy, though, he was just kind of…" He sighed. Given what Copyman had wanted to do Rock really couldn't support him. "It's hard to be me, and he didn't have any practice."

"People make mistakes," Dr. Light agreed. "It's just a matter of whether they admit they did and try to change or not. He has changed, from what I was told. What Dr. Cossack is doing is still illegal, although he's talking with Skullman about the situation this time. Hopefully the PR work will make it so that they can use Skullman as a test case without too much of a risk of the courts deciding that he needs to be executed," they'd say dismantled or some rot like that if they did. "Despite their best efforts."

"I mean, everyone knows about the Cossackbots, but Copyman wouldn't be a very good test case." Rock nodded.

"Very, very true. What would you like to play?"

"I'll go look at the new board games." It took some effort to find a game that robot masters wouldn't automatically win at. Luckily Rock, unlike Blues it seemed, was able to keep himself from predicting the outcome of a dice roll before he did it. Thank goodness for learning curve, and Dr. Light found that re-learning old games, or learning new ones alongside his children was much more fun than winning.

Winning at a game didn't really matter. Yes, you'd won. So? There was always the next game.

In the end, everybody 'lost.' Everything was how you played the game, and you weren't playing against other people, or even the universe. You were attempting to live up to the image you had of yourself. The person you were trying to be or thought you were.

Really, giving X the ability to decide exactly who he wanted to be without instincts, programming, or other handicaps interfering was doing the equivalent of using that invincibility cheat code Forte had been saying was only for losers who couldn't do it the real way, but he was a father. Parents were supposed to help give their children the tools to win at life.

Rock had his hands over his eyes, trying to not use his improved vision to tell where Dr. Light's eyes were focusing, as that would be an unfair advantage at this game. "Stop that. I'm not so old and foolish that I can't bluff _you_, Rock."

Rock looked sheepish and his father smiled. "Okay."

"If I only win because you're going easy on me then I'm not winning at all." He motioned for the boy to get on with it. "I'm playing this game with you, not a blind person."

With my son. By blood or not, _with_ blood or not.

Later, Rock said what he had been thinking. "Do you think Blues would want to play with us sometimes?"

"I hope so."

"What do you think would be fun for all of us, though? Forte wouldn't want to play anything he's definitely going to lose."

"How about truth or dare?"

"Yeah! He'd just have to come if we invited him to do that." Rock grinned, because he had the smartest dad in the whole universe.

It was a lot to live up to.

It was well worth it.

* * *

And a bit above here is the bit where I was wondering how on earth I was going to end this and went, dude, the problem with writing life-like stories is that life? Lacks nice, clean, convenient happy endings. In life, endings are rarely happy. To have one's story end is to die. The 'happy' part is the part where life goes on and people are having fun. Hence, that is this story's ending.

Really, the more I go for realistic speech the more my sentence structure sucks. The more I go for realism the more the plot fails to satisfy the desire for cliche story elements that is why those elements became cliche. I think I need to start heading back more towards non-realistic, conventional writing. But doing it the real way is fun! Life doesn't have endings where all plot threads are resolved! The majority of one's life is spent with no real clue what is going on! Actually, all of it is...

Problem is we read fiction to get away from that, to a degree. Our minds like solving problems, so fiction provides solvable problems and solutions to them.

In any case, here is yet another novella in my ongoing quest in search of the perfect writing style. Of course, perfection is impossible, but if one ceases to strive for it one ends up with garbage. One also, it appears, encounters a lot of that during the quest...


End file.
